We raced to the Playhouse on Tuesday night to see the premiere of a new production of the Alan Sillitoe story written in the late 1950s.
It is about a young lad who gets into trouble and ends up in a youth offenders centre, or Borstal as it used to be known, but he is a good runner and so is encouraged to compete for the prison in a race against a public school.
It was a good production with a clever use of a predominately empty stage and back projection. There was no interval and the actor who played the antihero was on stage all the time and without a break. This came to about 90 minutes. A bravado performance, which included a lot of running, done on a hidden treadmill.
There was a film version made in 1962 which starred Tom Courtney. It also featured a very young John Thaw as another Borstal boy, before changing sides and playing coppers on TV in The Sweeney and Inspector Morse.
Here's a short to a promotional film made for the production which might be coming to a theatre near you in the next few weeks -
So, you ran to see a running Play, glad you enjoyed.
ReplyDeleteWe also enjoyed this clever adaptation of the book - though I felt exhausted just looking at the lead actor running, he must be very fit.
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