McGowan Debuts as Playwright with Comic Timing

When Julian Mann goes to work one morning, the last person he expects to find alongside him in the tiny room is his ‘ex’. And she’s not just any ‘ex’. She’s the ‘ex’ – the woman who captured his heart, the woman who shared his life for five years, the woman who walked out on him and who hasn’t spoken to him since.

Edward Baker-Duly (Rookery Nook, Gone with the Wind, South Pacific stars as Julian in a cast that also includes Paul Bazely, Matt Cross, Louise Ford, Dean Gaffney, Peter Hamilton Dyer and Georgia Mackenzie. The premiere production is directed by Tamara Harvey, designed by Lucy Osborne and produced by Nimax Theatres’ owners Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer.

Best known to TV fans from The Big Impression, over the past few years Alistair McGowan has also been rapidly building up his stage acting credits in plays including Endgame and The Government Inspector and musicals including Merry Wives, The Mikado, Little Shop of Horrors, Cabaret and They’re Playing Our Song.

Last month, he returned to the Edinburgh Fringe as a performer, for the first time in 13 years, with two shows, a tribute to Noel Coward and Alistair McGowan: The One and Many, which he’s touring the UK with this autumn. October sees two other big launches for McGowan: the publication of his autobiographical football addiction self-help book A Matter of Life and Death, co-written with The Big Impression’s Ronni Ancona, and the opening of the film My Life in Ruins, in which he appears with Nia Vardalos and Richard Dreyfuss.