Bang Out of Order! by Peter Newark

Author:Peter Newark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brown Dog Books

CHAPTER 9

A Bedroom on Broadway

After eleven packed weeks at the Prince of Wales in London, Bedroom Farce embarked on its grand North American tour, presented by Whitehead-Stevens, George W George, and Frank Milton. The 1979 tour started in Canada in January with a four-week stay at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto. To celebrate what would be the 300th performance of the play, Peter Hall took his players to the Whalers Wharf restaurant for Sunday dinner before the opening and arranged a suite at the Royal York for dinner after the opening.

Gina Mallet of the Toronto Star began her review of 23 January:

The expression is ‘achingly funny’—that’s when you can’t stop laughing, or someone won’t let you. Last night at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, the National Theatre Company of Great Britain bustled on stage with Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce and immediately set about creating mayhem. In charge of the riot is an actress named Joan Hickson who has the face of an elegant prune and the voice of a wailing violin… Susan Littler and Derek Newark as a couple torn between saws and sex were almost as irresistible as Gough and Hickson doddering around their bedroom.

It set the tone for a triumphant tour that gathered praise in almost every city. In Washington DC, the play opened at the Elsenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center from 20 February till 24 March and the Washington Post mentioned in particular Michael Gough, Joan Hickson, and the delightful Susan Littler: ‘Enchanting is the only word for Susan Littler, as the guiless, trusting Kate. Littler has a broad, open face, topped by blonde bangs and a knot at the top of her head. With gruff, blustering Derek Newark as her partner, Littler’s trustful little smiles will touch your heart and I for one can’t wait to see her again.’

After four sell-out weeks in dignified Washington the play moved to brash and brilliant Broadway, the mecca of show business. It opened on 29 March at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, so-named after a famous critic of The New York Times. Douglas Watt theatre critic of the New York Daily News was in the first night audience:

Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce which spread hilarity through the Atkinson last night is a masterly comic construction, inventive enough to make Feydeau’s cheeks burn in his grave… The all-British cast —which will be gradually replaced by American players after nine weeks—is exemplary… Derek Newark is magnificent in his bursts of rage as he endeavors to assemble a desk as a gift for his tired wife Kate, a delightful ninny of enormous appeal as set forth by Susan Littler.

William B Collins of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that ‘Alan Ayckbourn is an enemy of sleep and a friend of laughter… Susan Littler gives a delicious impression of dawning consciousness as her husband Derek Newark works through the night assembling that fragile desk…’ Jack O’Brian, the Voice of Broadway, was yet another Littler fan: ‘Susan Littler is a fine, funny Ayckbourn central clown. She is

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