An unusual Sunday evening performance, this by a theatre company of prison inmates, performing through Synergy Productions, now known as Synergy Theatre Project. I sense from the website archive that Dealers Choice at The Orange Tree might have been their first ever production. 25 years later, Synergy is still going strong.
Esther Baker directed the cast, who came from HMP Latchmere House.
I remember we thought the performances and production was very good. Similar quality to the “semi-professional” productions we might see at The Questors Theatre with The Duchess, e.g.
Dealer’s Choice was an early Marber play that we missed when it was first produced. We are both so glad to have seen this production of it at The Orange Tree, as part of a small audience, witnessing the early stages of Synergy Theatre Project’s fine work.
This cast and crew looked too good to miss as well. Gillian Barge, Cherie Lunghi, James Laurenson, Nicky Henson, Nicola Walker & Cheryl Campbell, directed by Michael Grandage. Here’s the Theatricalia entry for it.
In those days, the Donmar was one of our favourites – it didn’t feel quite so corporate/touristic back then. We were able to get decent seats for a Saturday night through a sensible type of membership scheme.
I remember this as a fine production but I also remember us finding it a little underwhelming.
John Gross in The Sunday Telegraph liked it, while finding it a lesser play than Pinter’s Betrayal or Stoppard’s The Real Thing:
I sense that the Donmar showings in April/May were actually all deemed to be a preview run ahead of a lengthy West End run with this cast throughout the summer – an experiment that clearly worked and which was part of the Donmar’s journey towards a more commercial/corporate style. Hence few reviews but several preview pieces in the press.
Nick Curtis’s Standard interview with Nichols is interesting:
A rare Monday evening visit to the theatre for us. I had booked the day out as a long weekend. Perhaps Janie had intended to do the same, but her diary shows that she treated some patients, engineering it that she ended up in the Kensington & Chelsea area.
We really liked the stuff that little Chelsea Theatre was putting on back then – it had a short flowering of producing the sort of unusual fringe theatre stuff that we like.
This play was basically a biographical piece about Kahlil Gibran, not least the birth of his great work, The Prophet.
This production was very much a family affair for the Sawalha family, with author Nadim appearing in the production, along with brother Nabil and a couple of other Sawalhas; Lara & Omar, in some cases doubling up, playing several smaller parts. Gerald Key played Gibran, Briony Glassco played Mary Haskell and Colin Redgrave directed the production.
We rather liked the piece and performances. But then Janie had/has a bit of a thing about The Prophet. But 25 years later, I don’t think I’d get a positive answer if I suggested a Monday night at the theatre, even if the subject matter was close to Janie’s heart!
But on this occasion, our friend, Michael Billington, disagreed with us, comparing The Novice unfavourably with a play at the Royal Court, Mr Kolpert, which we did not see, despite going to the theatre an infeasible number of times that May.
This was one of our “oh wow!” visits to the theatre.
Superb,
was all I write in the log, but I knew I wouldn’t need to write much down because the evening was so memorable.
It was a bank holiday Monday and Mum’s birthday. “How did you get away with that?”, I hear you readers cry.
My diary notes that we went to Mum & Dad for bank holiday lunch before going on to the RNT for Blue / Orange. Simple enough.
This is a great play, which was masterfully performed by Chiwetel Ejiofor (our first sighting of him), Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy. Roger Michell directed. Theatricalia tells all here.
My friend, Michael Billington, had a downer on the National at that time – it took me a dozen or so more years to acquire a similar view. Still, Michael B approved of this one:
In truth I remember little about this play/production at the Lyric Studio, other than the fact that it was one of those plays with lots of video projection.
Mostly such plays leave us cold, which I think this one did, although sometimes, when done well, the mixture of live performance and video effects can be stunning, such as Bluets, which we saw last year (as I write in 2025):
According to Janie’s diary, the piece was a merciful 80 minutes long and we went on to dine at a place called The Springbok Cafe on Devonshire Road in Chiswick- very appropriate given that Deborah Levy is of South African origin! Strangely, I remember the meal more than the play.
That was my log note for this memorable evening of theatre.
Celebration was a brand new play. The Room a revival of Pinter’s first. Harold himself directing as well as writing – not always a brilliant idea but Harold could pull that trick off.
What a cast! Keith Allen, Andy de la Tour, Lindsay Duncan, Steven Pacey, Indira Varma, Lia Williams, Danny Dyer, Nina Raine, Henry Woolf, George Harris and others. Theatricalia holds chapter and verse on the cast lists etc.:
Where was Michael Billington, who was a regular Orange Tree reviewer back then, that’s what I want to know? And where did Janie and I eat? That second question is easier – for sure we’d have eaten at Don Fernando’s back then.
This was the first of two Krapps that Janie and I had in the early part of the century, as it were. The second was Harold Pinter’s Krapp at The Royal Court, which I shall Ogblog in the fullness of time.
I really liked this one, John Hurt’s, while marginally preferring the Pinter. Janie only got on with Harold’s Krapp.
This one included the mime show intro, whereas Harold’s didn’t. I expect it was the mime show and banana business that put Janie off a bit.
I had long rated John Hurt as an actor and felt he did justice to this difficult part…and that it did justice to him.
The critics got very excited at the idea of John Hurt bringing his acclaimed Gate Theatre Dublin performance of Krapp to London. Here’s Maureen Paton in The Telegraph a couple of weeks before the show landed in London:
Actually, we got wind of this production late and ended up booking seats for the very last night of the run, in order to score decent ones. Janie’s diary note reads “Row C – four rows back”.
Here is Patrick Marmion’s review from The Standard:
…and were very keen to see Conor McPherson’s next one.
Further, as members who had been loyal through the years of “exile” while The Royal Court was being redone, we were invited that Friday afternoon to a “guided tour” of the revamped building. Janie and I were both motivated to take a Friday afternoon off work and “go see” before the show.
It was on that tour that Janie and I spotted the little nook seat in a recess of the stairway just before you get to the upstairs bar…latterly the library. We took a shine to that nook and for many years took great pleasure in having a pre-show or interval drink in there.
As for Dublin Carol, we really liked it and it cemented our view that Conor McPherson was a writer to watch. It didn’t quite pack the punch of The Weir, but that play was always going to be a tough act to follow.
Brian Cox played the lead in Dublin Carol, with great charisma. Andrew Scott, & Bronagh Gallagher were also excellent in support. Ian Rickson directed.
I’m not sure what the critics made of it at the time…let’s find out.
I’d forgotten this bit, but because of delays to the finishing of The Royal Court, Dublin Carol previewed at The Old Vic for a while. Susannah Clapp reviewed it, with great enthusiasm, there…
But most of the subsequent reviews seemed to want to talk about the grand opening of the newly refurbished Royal Court than the play/production that graced it, doing McPherson, Cox et. al. no favours. Please note, the grand opening was two or three weeks before the hoi polloi tour that we enjoyed in March.
