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Hull Adapts 1984, Premieres Bean & Cooks ElvisDate: 1 September 2005
Hull Truck tonight kicks off its autumn/winter season – which includes world premieres of new work by Richard Bean and Gordon Steel - with Lee Hall’s Cooking with Elvis, which runs at Hull before and after a regional tour.
The 1999 black comedy, written by Billy Elliot’s Lee Hall, revolves around a cooking-mad teenage girl, her promiscuous mother and her paralysed Elvis impersonator father. In 2000, Cooking with Elvis had a successful run at the West End’s Whitehall Theatre, where it starred comedian Frank Skinner. The play was first seen at Hull Truck in 2003.
Directed by associate artistic director Gareth Tudor Price, the play runs at Hull from 1 to 10 September 2005 and then again from 21 November to 10 December. In between, it visits Loughborough, Buxton, Huddersfield, Winchester, Scunthorpe, Kendal, Worcester, Poole, Liverpool and, from 24 to 29 September, London’s Hackney Empire.
Back in Hull, from 22 September to 15 October 2005, artistic director John Godber revives his 1988 play Salt of the Earth, a comedy about a mining family in West Yorkshire which spans 41 years of dreams, joy and sorrow. It’s followed, from 27 October to 12 November 2005, by the world premiere of Nick Lane’s new adaptation of George Orwell’s literary classic 1984, featuring the original Big Brother.
At Christmas, Hull will present three seasonal plays. When Santa Got Stuck in the Fridge, a children’s story with songs and rhymes, runs from 23 November to 10 December 2005. Nick Lane’s Scrooge 2 - The 12 Days of Christmas, for those aged four and up, sees the miser from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol back on form and runs from 19 December 2005 to 7 January 2006. Providing seasonal silliness for the grown-ups is Gordon Steel’s new comedy A Kick in the Baubles, about a typically disastrous Christmas in the Bailey family. Directed by Gareth Tudor Price, it runs from 15 December 2005 to 21 January 2006.
In the New Year, Wrestling Mad touches down again for three days from 26 to 28 January 2006 prior to another UK tour. It’s followed by two world premiere plays by Jane Thornton and Richard Bean.
In Thornton’s physical comedy I Want That Hair, three women who each think the others have perfect lives realise their own good fortunes and understand that a new haircut can’t turn their worlds around. Directed by Godber, it’s at Hull Truck from 2 to 25 February 2006 and then embarks on a regional tour.
Bean’s new drama Up on the Roof, which is directed by Tudor Price and runs from 2 to 25 March 2006, is set in the midst of the Hull prison riot in 1976. The Hull-born author’s other acclaimed plays include Under the Whaleback, Honeymoon Suite, Toast, The God Botherers and Harvest, which premieres this month at London’s Royal Court (See News, 1 Aug 2005).
- by Caroline Ansdell
