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Chris Bartlett (born in Bridgend, Wales on 25 August 1976) is a Welsh, Cheshire-based playwright and arts journalist.
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Chris Bartlett (born in Bridgend, Wales on 25 August 1976) is a Welsh, Cheshire-based playwright and arts journalist.
Along with Nick Awde, he co-wrote the stage play Pete and Dud: Come Again , a hit at the Assembly Rooms at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe (under the title of Come Again: The World of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore), where it was shortlisted for a Fringe First Award by The Scotsman, before transferring to London's West End at The Venue (now Leicester Square Theatre), in March 2006, starring Kevin Bishop as Dudley Moore, Tom Goodman-Hill as Peter Cook and Colin Hoult as Jonathan Miller. [1]
Pete and Dud: Come Again also headlined the Best of British theatre festival at the Bruce Morton Centre in Auckland in June 2006 and was published in playtext form by Methuen (2006). It embarked on a three-month tour of the UK in spring 2007.
The play charts the sometimes rocky relationship between Moore and Cook, from their first pairing as part of the pioneering Beyond the Fringe in 1960 to their controversial Derek and Clive albums in the late seventies. It was described as "an absorbing tragicomedy about the price of laughter and the true cost of fame" by William Cook in British newspaper The Guardian when it transferred to the West End.
A follow-up, Unnatural Acts, a comedy drama also written with Awde about two flatmates – one a gay man and the other a heterosexual woman – who decide to have a baby, premiered at the Gilded Balloon as part of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, starring Jessica Martin and Jason Wood.
In 2011 he wrote the narration for A Christmas Carol Unplugged, an acoustic musical concert performance inspired by Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol , produced by Awde and performed at the Union Chapel, Islington by Slade star Noddy Holder and musicians including Knox of The Vibrators.
The Tales of Malik-Mammed, a play written for children by Bartlett inspired by Azerbaijani fairy tales, ran at Chelsea Theatre in March 2015 as part of the Buta Festival, produced by Aloff Theatre. [2]
Since 2017, Bartlett has collaborated with the Alhambra Theatre, Morecambe. A new version of Little Red Riding Hood, written by Bartlett, was performed there as part of the theatre's Morecambe Fringemas Festival in December 2017 and in workshops with local schools. A Christmas Carol Unplugged was also performed at the 2017 Fringemas Festival. An adaptation by Bartlett of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days was performed at the Alhambra's Story Festival in March 2018 and at the Morecambe Steampunk Festival "A Splendid Day Out" in June 2018.
In February 2014 a short radio play Fifty-Fifty, written by Bartlett, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in The Verb's drama strand. [3]
Bartlett has also written for the BBC Radio 4 comedy series Bearded Ladies (radio show).
As a feature writer, sub-editor and reviewer, Bartlett has contributed to publications including Radio Times , Heat and New Woman, he is currently the Duty Editor for planning on BBC Homepage. He has written articles and theatre reviews for The Stage since 1999. [4]
Peter Edward Cook was an English comedian, actor, satirist, playwright and screenwriter. He was the leading figure of the British satire boom of the 1960s, and he was associated with the anti-establishment comedic movement that emerged in the United Kingdom in the late 1950s.
Dudley Stuart John Moore CBE was an English actor, comedian, musician and composer. Moore first came to prominence in the UK as a leading figure in the British satire boom of the 1960s. He was one of the four writer-performers in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe from 1960 that created a boom in satiric comedy. With a member of that team, Peter Cook, Moore collaborated on the BBC television series Not Only... But Also. As a popular double act, Moore's buffoonery contrasted with Cook's deadpan monologues. They jointly received the 1966 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance and worked together on other projects until the mid-1970s, by which time Moore had settled in Los Angeles to concentrate on his film acting.
Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. It debuted at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival and went on to play in London's West End and then in America, both on tour and on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s. Hugely successful, it is widely regarded as seminal to the "satire boom", the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain.
Pete and Dud were characters played by the comedians and entertainers Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
Alan Bennett is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George (1994). In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
John Eric Bartholomew, known by his stage name Eric Morecambe, was an English comedian who together with Ernie Wise formed the double act Morecambe and Wise. The partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe's death in 1984. Morecambe took his stage name from his home town, the seaside resort of Morecambe in Lancashire.
The Cambridge Footlights, commonly referred to simply as Footlights, is a student sketch comedy troupe located in Cambridge, England. Footlights was founded in 1883, and is one of Britain's oldest student sketch comedy troupes. The comedy society is run by the students of Cambridge University.
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.
Not Only... But Also is a BBC British sketch comedy show starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore that aired in three series between 1964 and 1970.
Not Only But Always is a British TV movie, originally screened on the Channel 4 network in the UK on 30 December 2004.
Nick Awde Hill is a British writer, artist, singer-songwriter and critic. He lives in London and Brussels.
Kevin Brian Bishop is a British actor, comedian and writer. He is best known for his roles as Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island, Stupid Brian in My Family, and Nigel Norman Fletcher in the 2016 revival of Porridge, and as star of The Kevin Bishop Show, which he co-wrote with Lee Hupfield.
Pete and Dud: Come Again is a stage play about British Beyond the Fringe comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, which was written by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde. The comedy-drama had a sold-out run at the Assembly Rooms as part of the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it was shortlisted for a Fringe First Award by The Scotsman, before moving to London's West End at The Venue in March 2006; this version starred Kevin Bishop as Moore, Tom Goodman-Hill as Cook, Colin Hoult as Jonathan Miller, and Fergus Craig as Alan Bennett. It was published in playtext form by Methuen.
A Christmas Carol, the 1843 novella by Charles Dickens (1812–1870), is one of the English author's best-known works. It is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a greedy miser who hates Christmas but who is transformed into a caring, kindly person through the visitations of four ghosts. The classic work has been dramatised and adapted countless times for virtually every medium and performance genre, and new versions appear regularly.
Fergus Craig is a British stand-up comic and actor in theatre, television and radio. He studied at the University of Manchester. Craig is one half of the double act Colin & Fergus, with actor and writer Colin Hoult.
Frisky & Mannish is a British musical comedy double act, created and performed by singer Laura Corcoran and pianist-singer Matthew Floyd Jones. Known for their pop music parodies, the duo have toured the fringe festival and comedy festival circuits in the United Kingdom and Australia, and appeared on a number of British television and radio programmes. The act's name derives from two incidental characters mentioned in one couplet of Byron's Don Juan: "Lady Fitz-Frisky, and Miss Maevia Mannish, / Both longed extremely to be sung in Spanish"
Colin Hoult is an English actor and writer in television, radio, and theatre. He studied at Manchester Metropolitan School of Theatre.
Film Stars is a well-known comedy sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It originally featured on their BBC sketch show Not Only... But Also (1965) and was subsequently performed many times on stage by the duo.
Sabrina Mahfouz is a British-Egyptian poet, playwright, performer and writer from South London, England. Her published work includes poetry, plays and contributions to several anthologies.
Benjamin Hart is an English magician. In 2007, he was awarded the "Young Magician of the Year" award by The Magic Circle. Hart has worked on British television and is an inventor and designer of magic tricks and stage illusions. In 2014, he starred in Killer Magic on BBC Three. Hart was a finalist on Britain's Got Talent in 2019. He is a member of The Magic Circle (organisation)