Season 54 Play 5 – Out Of Order by Ray Cooney
Directed by
Cast
Richard Willey M.P. – David Templeton
The Manager – Peter Berry
The Waiter – Howard Clements
Jane Worthington – Gilly Rogers
A Bodv – Jeff Peacock
George Pigden – Mark Simister
Ronnie Worthington – lan Wilkinson
Pamela Willey – Laura Campbell
Gladys – Julia Roberts
Synopsis
When Richard Willey, a Government Junior Minister, plans to spend the evening with Jane Worthington (one of the Opposition’s typists) things go disastrously wrong, beginning with the discovery of a “body” trapped in the hotel’s only unreliable sash window. Desperately trying to get out of an extremely sticky situation, Richard calls for his PPS who is soon in trouble with everybody and things go from bad to worse.
Directors Notes
Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to BLT for our production of Out of Order. Out of Order is a wonderful British farce written by Ray Cooney, who, as all you theatre addicts will remember, also wrote the brilliant Run for your Wife, which ran very successfully here last year. Out of Order won the Olivier Award in 1991 for best British comedy and that is no mean feat. In that production Donald Sinden played the part of the MP Richard Willey and Michael Williams his sidekick George Pigden. In fact the play, performed at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, was also littered with other famous names like Brian Murphy who of course was George in George and Mildred and Sandra Dickenson. So we have an awful lot to live up to this evening, but I am sure you will not be disappointed. The newspapers and news programmes have been littered with political scandals over the years, the Profumo scandal in the sixties, Cecil Parkinson of course and our dear friends the Hamiltons. However I am sure none has ever heard of the Willey scandal! It is one which the government would have liked to have swept under the carpet, but tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, you are going to be a fly on the wall in the Westminster Hotel suite of no other than Richard Willey MP a real rogue if ever I saw one. You will see for yourself how he will use any means he can to get himself out of the tightest of situations, using his mistress Jane, his Parliamentary Private Secretary, George, how he deceives his wife Pamela and how he can get rid of a mysterious person who just happens to get in his way. Well just sit back and judge for yourself and hopefully enjoy tonight’s perfomance of a scandal that the media will never get to hear about. Watch and enjoy.
