Production notes for "A Bad Case of Love"
Hello and welcome to the 1st play in Eastern Angles' 12th season. We start this season in a rather different way from the others as we are without Ivan Cutting, the company's artistic director, who has finally gone away on his much talked about sabbatical.
Having worked virtually non-stop for the company for all of its 14 years we thought it was time he had a well-earned rest and as a result he is now touring the West Coast of the Americas. So far he has traveled down through Canada via Alaska and into North America, and last we heard he was heading down towards Mexico! However, it is not all rest for him, and you can be sure that you will be seeing the results of the research he has been doing in forthcoming productions.
Ivan will be returning in November just in time to direct this year's Christmas mystery at the Sir John Mills Theatre which this year sees the welcome reappearance in Ipswich of the master detective himself in "Sherlock Holmes and the Curse of the Mummy's Tomb". In a quest to find missing archeological treasure Holmes and Watson soon find themselves entangled with ancient mummies and narrowly escaping becoming sacrificial offerings to an ancient deity. Who know what the outcome will be - but you can be sure it will involve mince pies and our infamous punch, so we hope you can join us.
Following this we are reviving our popular 1984 production of The Reapers Year. Set at the end of the last century it is a musical celebration of rural life as well as a moving evocation of the passionate struggle of the farmworkers in East Anglia to win the right to vote. Ivan is hoping that during his sabbatical he will be able to unearth stories of the labourers who emigrated to Canada following the failure of the Great Lock Our in 1874 to add an extra dimension to the original script.
To end the season we have commissioned playwright Alastair Cording to adapt Dicken's classic tale of childhood and marriage "David Copperfield" especially for us. Alastair recently adapted "A Scots Quair" for TAG Theatre in Glasgow to much national acclaim and we are delighted to have him working with us. His adaptation looks at the story from a slightly different angled than the original novel to bring something extra to the stage, but it still contains Dickens' wonderful characters including the archetypal villain, Uriah Heep, and the unforgettably flamboyant Mr Micawber.
But for now let us return to "A Bad Case of Love". When Robert Rigby (remember his wonderful "Peculiar People" in 1992) first approached us many months ago with his idea for a film-noir style tale full of classis themes of murder, mystery, love and revenge and set in the world of illegal gambling in the 1950s (which apparently he knows far too much about!) we leapt at the chance to use it. And to do this atmospheric tale the justice it deserves while Ivan is away we brought in a guest director - Anna Farthing - whom we would like to welcome to the company. I hope you enjoy the show and now over to Anna herself to tell you more....
It is a great privilege for me to be "holding the baby" while Ivan is away, and I have very much enjoyed working with the Eastern Angles' staff. I am also delighted to have collaborated with a highly skilled creative team and talented cast, one or two of whom you may recognize from previous Eastern Angles' productions.
Film noir has always been one of my favourite film genres, and I have long been a fan of those pioneering film directors Edward Dmytryk ("Crossfire" "Farewell, My Lovely"), Billy Wilder ("Double Indemnity") and John Huston ("The Maltese Falcon". They always managed to combine the gritty truth of urban life with the surreal nature of human passion. Their characters live in a pressure cooker where obsession, lust and deception lead each hero and heroine to the most extreme action; whether this be heroism in saving others or murder. In the 1990s we are present with news from contemporary America, in which human beings can be "rubbed out" like a pencil sketch. These stories hark back to a time when taking another's life was still the most extreme of actions, and yet the morality is not simple. These are not action pictures, the dramatic climax is never the killing itself, but the moment when one person decides to kill another. The focus remains firmly with the motivation of the killer, and we, the audience, are asked to play the psychoanalyst: it is for us to judge the "why".
I hope you will enjoy this production, and leave making up your own minds about the motives for and the morality of murder!
Anna Farthing