HENCEFORWARD... by

ALAN AYCKBOURN

 

17th to 20th May 2006

   

PICTURE GALLERY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE FLYER

Composer Jerome wants his daughter back - and will go to great lengths to get her. She is his muse after all. But is it really a good idea to try to fool his former wife and the authorities with a substitute girlfriend?

Hilarious happenings, glimpses of the future and a message about getting our priorities right run through this comedy from Britain's most popular living playwright.

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FROM THE PROGRAMME

 

ABOUT THIS PRODUCTION

Henceforward was first performed in 1987 (in Scarborough of course) and my wife and I were fortunate enough to see the original production. It is Ayckbourn's first play set in the future, though as he says in the script, “sometime quite soon”. This left us with a few difficult decisions to make because not surprisingly, Ayckbourn's vision of the future was not always accurate, and we've already travelled further forwards than he was looking.

We did consider sticking exactly to Ayckbourn's predictions - in some ways it would have been an additional humorous thread to the play to spot where he got things right, and where he didn’t. However in the end I decided that it was truer to the playwright's intentions to make a couple of tiny alterations to the script, to update the play for our time - or rather our time to come. After all, the original audiences were in no position to assess Sir Alan’s powers of prediction.

In the script, for example, Mervyn is very proud of having 2 portable phones - one for work and one for home - and his answer-phone is yet another machine. Today nearly everybody has a mobile phone with an answering service - and if you need 2 lines you can have them both in the same handset. So we’ve moved our Mervyn on to ‘virtual reality headsets’ as the next generation of communication devices, and a ‘digital secretary’ to automatically respond to his calls, update his calendar and maintain his ‘ToDo’ list.

One prediction that Ayckbourn got right on the button was the ‘location finder’ device, which in the original script was his ‘very interesting’ gadget. But GPS devices are so common, and relatively cheap now that they are no longer special. Instead I have added the ‘instant translation’ device, and the weak joke associated with it is mine, please don’t blame Sir Alan.

So despite being nearly 20 years old, very little updating was needed - fortunately androids haven’t become commonplace!

 

LACK OF POTENTIAL

Those of you who studiously read the programme for our last play (the very popular Hobson’s Choice) may have been a little surprised to see that this production is not Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential as previously intended. In fact by Christmas we had just about cast the play (and it had a large cast) and a significant amount of preparation had been done. Unfortunately as work resumed after the festivities, several actors found that they had more commitments than expected, and had to withdraw.

After just a little period of panicking, I remembered this play, Henceforward, which has a more modest cast size, and which we had considered producing several years ago. We’ll bring you Comic Potential ASAP – especially as we’ve bought the scripts!

 

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

One practical issue with producing Henceforward is that the musical piece at the finale really ought to feature the voice of the actress who plays Corinna – and that means we needed somebody to compose us an original piece of music. I’m delighted that an HSBC colleague, Dave Dakin, was on hand to write such a piece for us, and I’ll hope you’ll agree it fits into the production perfectly. Dave also wrote our pre-show music.

PHIL GEORGE

 

 

 

 

The Flyer  

Midland Players Amateur Dramatic Society, Sheffield, UK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Midland Players thank the following, whose assistance is greatly appreciated:

The Staff at the University Drama Studio

HSBC Sports and Social Club for rehearsal space

Abbey Stainless Steels for storage space

HSBC Bank plc for loan of the projector

Dave Dakin for composing our music