Photos

1st Night Photos: Bond’s Sea Rolls into West End

Editorial Staff
London's West End

The second production in the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s inaugural in-house season under the artistic direction of Jonathan Kent, a revival of Edward Bond’s 1973 black comedy The Sea starring Eileen Atkins and David Haig, opened last night (23 January 2008, previews from 17 January) for a limited season to 19 April (See Also Today’s Review Round-up).

Off the coast near a village in East Anglia, a young man drowns in a wild storm, sparking off a series of events that changes the lives of the village’s residents, including the bullying aristocrat Mrs Rafi (Atkins) and the desperate draper Mr Hatch (Haig). The 14-strong cast also features Marcia Warren, Mariah Gale, Russell Tovey, David Burke and Harry Lloyd.

Edward Bond has written over 40 plays, including Saved, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1965 and famously hastened the end of theatre censorship in this country. While Bond continues to write, however, disagreements with the Court as well as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company have meant that his work has been largely absent from British stages over the past two decades. The Sea premiered at the Royal Court in 1973 with Corale Brown as Mrs Rafi and was revived at the National in 1991, starring Judi Dench. This production marks The Sea’s West End premiere and the playwright’s West End debut.


TO SCROLL THROUGH ALL OF THE SEA’s 1st NIGHT PHOTOS,
JUST CLICK ON THE “NEXT >” LINKS BELOW THE FOLLOWING FRAME.

For 1st Night Photos, our Whatsonstage.com photographer Dan Wooller was on hand for The Sea curtain call at the Haymarket and the post-show party at the Embassy Club along with the company, director Jonathan Kent, Theatre Royal chairman Arnold M Crook and other first-night guests including Tom Hollander, David Lan, Nicholas Wright, Simon Thomas, Tobias Menzies, Terry Johnson, Fiona Glascott, Susanna Harker, Alexander Hanson and Sean Mathias.

– by Kate Jackson