Sir Nigel Barnard Hawthorne was an English actor. He is known for his stage acting and his portrayal of Sir Humphrey Appleby, the permanent secretary in the 1980s sitcom Yes Minister and the Cabinet Secretary in its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister. For this role, he won four BAFTA TV Awards for Best Light Entertainment Performance.
Shadowlands is a play by William Nicholson adapted from his 1985 television film of the same name, directed by Norman Stone and produced by David M. Thompson for BBC Wales. It debuted at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth on 5 October 1989 before premiering at the Queen's Theatre in London on 23 October 1989. The play is about the relationship between Oxford don and author C. S. Lewis and the American writer Joy Gresham.
The Royal Court Theatre, at different times known as the Court Theatre, the New Chelsea Theatre, and the Belgravia Theatre, is a non-commercial West End theatre in Sloane Square, London, England. In 1956 it was acquired by and remains the home of the English Stage Company, which is known for its contributions to contemporary theatre and won the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities in 1999.
Edward Bond is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, dramatic theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Other well-received works include Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1975), Restoration (1981), and the War trilogy (1985). Bond is broadly considered among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.
Lear is a 1971 three-act play by the British dramatist Edward Bond. It is a rewrite of William Shakespeare's King Lear. The play was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1971, featuring Harry Andrews in the title role. It was revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982 with Bob Peck, and revived again at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in 2005 with Ian McDiarmid.
The Lord Chamberlain's Office is a department within the British Royal Household. It is concerned with matters such as protocol, state visits, investitures, garden parties, royal weddings and funerals. For example, in April 2005 it organised the wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles. It is also responsible for authorising use of the Royal Arms.
Saved is a play by Edward Bond which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in November 1965.
The Theatres Act 1968 abolished stage censorship in the United Kingdom, receiving royal assent on 26 July 1968, after passing both Houses of Parliament.
Narrow Road to the Deep North is a 1968 satirical play on the British Empire by the English playwright Edward Bond.
William Campbell Rough Bryden was a Scottish stage and film director and screenwriter.
Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical performance in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.
The Madness of George III is a 1991 play by Alan Bennett. It is a fictionalised biographical study of the latter half of the reign of George III of the United Kingdom, his battle with mental illness, and the inability of his court to handle his condition. It was adapted for film in 1994 as The Madness of King George.
Barbara Gillian Ferris is an English actress and former fashion model.
Legitimate theatre is live performance that relies almost entirely on diegetic elements, with actors performing through speech and natural movement. Traditionally, performances of such theatre were termed legitimate drama, while the abbreviation the legitimate refers to legitimate theatre or drama and legit is a noun referring both to such dramas and actors in these dramas. Legitimate theatre and dramas are contrasted with other types of stage performance such as musical theatre, farce, revue, melodrama, burlesque and vaudeville, as well as recorded performances on film and television.
Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is a 1973 play by English playwright Edward Bond. It depicts an ageing William Shakespeare at his Warwickshire home in 1615 and 1616, suffering pangs of conscience in part because he signed a contract which protected his landholdings, on the condition that he would not interfere with an enclosure of common lands that would hurt the local peasant farmers. Although the play is fictional, this contract has a factual basis. Bingo is a political drama heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Epic theatre. Some have praised Bond's portrayal of Shakespeare while others have criticized it.
The Fruits of Enlightenment, aka Fruits of Culture is a play by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. It satirizes the persistence of unenlightened attitudes towards the peasants amongst the Russian landed aristocracy. In 1891 Constantin Stanislavski achieved success when he directed the play for his Society of Art and Literature organization.
Privates on Parade: A Play with Songs in Two Acts is a 1977 farce by English playwright Peter Nichols, with music by Denis King. The drama draws upon Nichols' own experiences in the real-life Combined Services Entertainment, the postwar successor to ENSA, Entertainments National Service Association. The play is noteworthy for, inter alia, a series of musical numbers, performed by the male lead, parodying the style of such performers as Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich and Carmen Miranda.
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance: a play, opera, mime, ballet, etc., performed in a theatre, or on radio or television. Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics —the earliest work of dramatic theory.
The Fool: Scenes of Bread and Love is a play by the English playwright Edward Bond. It traces the life of the poet John Clare against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution, from his roots in rural East Anglia via literary success in London to his final years in a lunatic asylum. The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1975, in a production directed by Peter Gill and featuring a cast including Tom Courtenay, David Troughton and Nigel Terry among others.
Greville John Poke was an arts administrator and a founding member of the English Stage Company. He served as the Honorary Secretary of the English Stage Company from 1954 to 1973 and chairman from 1973 to 1978.
