Tricycle Plays Golf, Revives Loot with Matt Di Angelo

EastEnders’ Matt Di Angelo (pictured) will star in a major new revival of Joe Orton’s 1965 black comedy Loot as part of the newly announced summer/autumn season at north London’s Tricycle Theatre. Other programme highlights include the UK premiere of the late American dramatist August Wilson’s final play, Filter Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night and, as previously tipped (See The Goss, 13 May 2008), return stints for two previous Tricycle hits, Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight and Magnolias and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Let There Be Love.

Moonlight and Magnolias opens the new schedule, running for four weeks from 2 July to 2 August 2008. Hutchinson’s 2004 comedy Moonlight and Magnolias had its London premiere last October (See News, 6 Aug 2007) and was nominated for a Whatsonstage.com Award for Best New Comedy. In it, movie mogul David O Selznick has just shut down production of Gone With the Wind and locked himself “script doctor” Ben Hecht and director Victor Fleming in a room for a marathon salvage session. Andy Nyman and Steven Pacey reprise their roles as Selznick and Fleming in Sean Holmes’ production.

Joseph Marcell also reprises his role as West Indian pensioner Alfred Morris in Kwei-Armah’s tale about immigrants, Let There Be Love, which returns from 5 to 30 August 2008, after its premiere at the Tricycle this past January (See News, 11 Oct 2007). Set against the music of Nat King Cole, the production directed by the author.

The returning productions are followed, from 2 to 27 September 2008 (preview 1 September), by Filter Theatre’s irreverent take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which was first seen in 2006 during the Royal Shakespeare Company year-long Complete Works Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. The cast includes Filter joint artistic directors Oliver Dinsdale and Ferdy Roberts.

Radio Golf, the final play in the late August Wilson’s epic ten-play cycle about the black experience in 20th-century America, receives its UK premiere on 6 October 2008 (previews from 2 October), in a run to 1 November. Written over 20 years, the cycle deals with the effects of slavery on successive generations of black Americans. Set in the 1990s, Radio Golf had its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005 just before Wilson’s death from cancer (See News, 3 Aug 2005), and transferred last year to Broadway.

The Tricycle has presented five other British premieres of Wilson’s work over the past 15 years. The first was Joe Turner’s Come and Gone followed by The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, King Hedley II and in 2006 Gem of the Ocean, the last four all directed by Paulette Randall, who also directs Radio Golf.

Sean Holmes returns to the theatre to direct the season’s final production, Joe Orton’s Loot, from 15 December 2008 (previews from 11 December) to 31 January 2009. The comedy centres on ne’er-do-wells Hal and Dennis who stage a bank heist. But the heist goes wrong and, pursued by police inspector Truscott, the two are forced to hide the loot in an unlikely place – the coffin of Hal’s recently deceased mother. Matt Di Angelo, who played Deano Wicks in EastEnders for two years and was most recently seen competing on Strictly Come Dancing, makes his professional stage debut as Hal. The last major West End outing of Loot was a Chichester Festival production that transferred to the Vaudeville Theatre a decade ago (See News, 15 Oct 1998).

– by Terri Paddock