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My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on the 1938 film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady. Despite his cynical nature and difficulty understanding women, Higgins grows attached to her.
The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage and the resulting satire of Victorian conformity. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour as the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest an enduringly popular play.
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.
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is an Irish actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and has served as its president since 2015. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours, and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times' list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Samuel Alexander Joseph West is an English actor, theatre director and narrator. He has directed on stage and radio, and worked as an actor in theatre, film, television, and radio. He has appeared as reciter with orchestras and performed at the Last Night of the Proms in 2002. He has narrated several documentary series, including five for the BBC about the Second World War.
Jonathan Adam Lynn is an English stage and film director, producer, writer, and actor. He directed the comedy films Clue, Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny, and The Whole Nine Yards. He also co-created and co-wrote the television series Yes Minister.
Anna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this work. According to historian Paul Avrich, the original of Anna Christie was Christine Ell, an anarchist cook in Greenwich Village, who was the lover of Edward Mylius, a Belgian-born radical living in England who libeled the British king George V.
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.
Pygmalion is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, named after the Greek mythological figure. It premièred at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913 and was first presented on stage in German. Its English-language première took place at His Majesty's Theatre in London's West End in April 1914 and starred Herbert Beerbohm Tree as phonetics professor Henry Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cockney flower-girl Eliza Doolittle.
Will Adamsdale is an English actor, comedian and writer. In 2004, he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his show Jackson's Way.
Stones in His Pockets is a two-hander written in 1996 by Marie Jones for the DubbleJoint Theatre Company in Dublin, Ireland.
Ian Shaw is an English stage and screen actor. He is the son of actress Mary Ure and actor Robert Shaw.
Jonathan Stuart Bailey is an English actor. Known for his comedic, dramatic, and musical roles on stage and screen, he is the recipient of a Laurence Olivier Award and a Critics' Choice Television Award.
Jonathan Holloway is an English theatre director and playwright. He founded and directed two professional companies in British fringe and touring theatre in the 1980s and 1990s, notably Red Shift Theatre Company. His work has won three Edinburgh Fringe First awards, the Shakespeare Prize at Chile's World Festival of Theatre in 1993, and in 2013 his BBC version of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four won a First Prize at the Prix Italia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2005 he was made an Honorary Fellow of St Mary's University, Twickenham.
Dominic Mafham is an English stage, film and television actor. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
The Lady is a 2011 British biographical film directed by Luc Besson, starring Michelle Yeoh as Aung San Suu Kyi and David Thewlis as her late husband Michael Aris. Yeoh called the film "a labour of love" but also confessed it had felt intimidating for her to play the Nobel laureate.
Ryan Craig is a British playwright, whose plays usually probe both social norms and ethical issues. He is also a writer for screen, television and radio.
Rhinoceros was a 1960 production of Eugène Ionesco's surrealist play of the same name, which had been written the year before. It was the first English-language production of the play, starred future husband-and-wife team Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright, and was directed by Orson Welles. Olivier also co-produced the play, which was Welles's last work as a theatre director.
Tim Crouch is a British experimental theatre maker, actor, writer and director. His plays include My Arm, An Oak Tree, ENGLAND, and The Author. These take various forms, but all reject theatrical conventions, especially realism, and invite the audience to help create the work. Interviewed in 2007, Crouch said, "Theatre in its purest form is a conceptual artform. It doesn't need sets, costumes and props, but exists inside an audience's head."
Anna Jordan is an English playwright, director, screenwriter and acting tutor. Her work has been presented at The Royal Court, Royal Exchange (Manchester) and internationally, with several productions of her plays in the United States and Germany, versions in Sweden, Ireland and productions planned in New Zealand, Canada and Turkey.