Plot
Subtitled on the Royal Court's posters as "an evening of high drung and slarrit", the play is in the absurdist tradition. It contains numerous diversions and non-sequiturs, such as people riding to hounds on camels, and a game of three-handed whist played by two participants, without cards, in the dark, but the core consists of the efforts of the son of the house, Kirby, to teach a collection of talking weight machines, which he has stolen, to sing the Hallelujah chorus from Messiah , and his father's decision to build a replica of the Old Bailey in the sitting room. Elsewhere in the household Mrs Groomkirby is so obsessed with cooking that she employs a neighbour to come in twice a week to help eat the food, and the daughter, Sylvia is dissatisfied with the length of her arms. In Mr Groomkirby's home-made Old Bailey a judge and counsel appear; Kirby is put on trial for mass murder (he kills people so as to indulge his passion for wearing black mourning) and his father is discredited as a witness under cross-examination, for failing to prove that he isn't in Chester-le-Street. [3]
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Black Comedy is a one-act farce by Peter Shaffer, first performed in 1965. The premise of the piece is that light and dark are transposed, so that when the stage is lit the cast are supposed to be in darkness and only when the stage is dark are they supposed to be able to see each other and their surroundings. A young sculptor and his fiancée have borrowed some expensive antique furniture from a neighbour's flat without his permission to impress an elderly millionaire art collector. When the power fails, the neighbour returns early, other people also arrive unexpectedly, and matters descend into near-chaos.
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Look Back in Anger is a 1959 British kitchen sink drama film starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom and Mary Ure and directed by Tony Richardson. The film is based on John Osborne's play about a love triangle involving an intelligent but disaffected working-class young man, his upper-middle-class, impassive wife (Alison) and her haughty best friend. Cliff, an amiable Welsh lodger, attempts to keep the peace. The character of Ma Tanner, only referred to in the play, is brought to life in the film by Edith Evans as a dramatic device to emphasise the class difference between Jimmy and Alison. The film and play are classic examples of the British cultural movement known as kitchen sink realism.
One Way Pendulum is a 1965 British comedy film directed by Peter Yates and starring Eric Sykes and George Cole. It is an adaptation of the play by N. F. Simpson.
Epitaph for George Dillon is an early John Osborne play, one of two he wrote in collaboration with Anthony Creighton. It was written before Look Back in Anger, the play which made Osborne's career, but opened a year after at Oxford Experimental Theatre in 1957, and was then produced at London's Royal Court theatre, where Look Back in Anger had debuted. It transferred to New York City shortly afterwards and garnered three Tony Award nominations.
Nicholas Selby was a British film, television and theatre actor. He appeared in more than one hundred television dramas on the BBC and ITV during the course of his career, including Our Friends in the North, Poldark and House of Cards. Selby was also a long-standing member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Simple Spymen is a farce by the English playwright John Chapman. The story concerns two street musicians who are mistakenly appointed by negligent army officers to act as bodyguards to protect a scientist from assassination by a foreign spy.
The "Dream Team" refers to the team of trial lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson in his 1995 trial for the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman. The team included Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, Carl Douglas, Shawn Chapman Holley, Gerald Uelmen, Robert Kardashian, Alan Dershowitz, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Robert Blasier, and William Thompson.
