News & Press

6.12.2007: For immediate release

New Roy Williams play to open New Wolsey spring season

The New Wolsey Theatre's spring 2008 season opens with the Eclipse Theatre production of Angel House (1 - 9 February), the latest play by award-winning playwright Roy Williams. Paulette Randall directs and design is by Libby Watson .

Press Night: Monday 4 February 2008 at 7.45pm, New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich .

How can two brothers with the same upbringing take such different paths? Fifty years ago, the Vincent family arrived from the West Indies and settled in the West London tower block Angel House. They brought with them suitcases full of hopes and dreams for themselves and future generations. But life has not worked out the way they expected. Over 24 hours, the interwoven stories and secrets of the Angel House residents collide in this compelling new drama.

Roy Williams won The John Whiting Award and The Evening Standard

Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright 2001. His Little Sweet Thing , also an Eclipse production, premiered at The New Wolsey in 2005 before touring nationally and his Sing Yer Heart Out For the Lads toured the UK last year, following its original production at the National Theatre. His 2003 play Fallout is currently being produced as a one off drama for Company Pictures/Channel Four Films and his RSC commission Days of Significance opens at the Tricycle Theatre in March 2008.

The Eclipse Theatre consortium consists of co-producing theatres The New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich, Birmingham Repertory Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse. After opening in Ipswich , Angel House tours to:

Manchester Contact Theatre 12 - 16 February

Birmingham Repertory Theatre 20 - 23 February

Nottingham Playhouse 26 February - 1 March

West Yorkshire Playhouse 18 - 22 March

Northampton Royal and Derngate 1 - 5 April

For further information about the Eclipse Theatre initiative, please visit www.eclipsetheatre.org.uk

New Wolsey Theatre Box Office 01473 295900 or online at www.wolseytheatre.co.uk

Now in its fifth year, Eclipse Theatre has built an enviable reputation for its productions, Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, Mother Courage, Little Sweet Thing and, most recently, Mustapha Matura’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.

The next production is well underway. Angel House, written by Roy Williams, directed by Paulette Randall
and designed by Libby Watson, hits the stage on 1st February 2008 at The New Wolsey in Ipswich, before touring the country.

A bit about the production:

How can two brothers with the same upbringing take such different paths?

Angel house is set Fifty years ago, the Vincent family arrived from the West Indies and settled in the West London tower block Angel House. They brought with them suitcases full of hopes and dreams for themselves and future generations. But life has not worked out the way they expected.

Jean’s son Frank, the ‘big man’ of the estate, is heading for prison, while her other son Stephen is a successful lawyer with political aspirations. Frank’s son Adam and the rest of the teenagers on the estate are all struggling to cope with life’s choices and their consequences.

Over 24 hours, the interwoven stories and secrets of the Angel House residents collide in this compelling new drama.

Roy Williams is one of Britain’s most celebrated writers having won numerous awards including; The 31st John Whiting Award, The Alfred Fagon Award 1997 and The Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for most Promising Playwright 2001. His 2003 play Falloutis currently being produced as a film for Company Pictures/ Channel Four Films.

“Compelling... a firecracker” The Times on Little Sweet Thing

“If you only get to the theatre once this year, do your utmost to get tickets for this riveting production brilliantly directed by Paulette Randall” Ipswich Evening Star on Three Sisters

The Guardian, Wednesday 6 February 2008

By my tally, this is the fifth new play from Roy Williams in the past year. This latest piece, with its faintly undercooked quality, suggests that Williams may be taking on too much.

Here, he offers a series of intersecting narratives. The unifying factor is the decaying tower block that gives the play its title and houses many of the characters. Two brothers are at loggerheads: Frank, about to go to jail for drug dealing, and Stephen, a thriving lawyer seeking to buy the building outright. Their mother, Jean, is haunted by the parental failings of herself and her faithless ex-husband. Inter-generational problems are fuelled by Frank's difficulty in communicating with his gay son, Adam, whose own best friend, Sean, is trying to cope with a crackhead dad.

Williams's main argument is clear: many immigrant families are confronted by cyclical misfortune, but the young can, by an effort of will, overcome their genetic inheritance. He writes strong scenes; the best show how Adam and Sean's sexual confusion is compounded by the mockery of a teenage girl. But there are too many loose ends, and Williams is vague about social and economic detail.

Paulette Randall's vigorous production makes atmospheric use of a Bernard Herrmann-style score, and the play's choppiness is overcome through ebullient acting. Claire Benedict, as the guilt-wracked Jean, and Geoff Aymer, doubling as her feckless ex and a bumbling long-time admirer, are outstanding. Mark Monero has real presence as the jail-bound Frank, and there is good work from Curtis Cole and Tendayi Jembere as the mixed-up kids. In the end, however, it is a play of vivacious episodes, in which Angel House itself never acquires a distinctive, determining character.

Michael Billington

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Telegraph, Wednesday 6 February 2008

Roy Williams is often described as one of our best black dramatists. He actually strikes me as one of our best dramatists tout court.

In his finest work - Fallout, Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads and Days of Significance, which the RSC finally brings to London next month - he offers superbly gripping dramas that explore the fault lines of Britain's multi-cultural society with rare dramatic power and precision.

If this wise and humane dramatist has a weakness it is that he is perhaps a little too prolific for his own artistic health and that occasionally his work can seem a touch scrappy. That's certainly my feeling about Angel House, which could usefully have gone through a couple more drafts before opening to the public.

I also believe Williams is at his most powerful and provocative when he shows the interaction between black and white characters, whereas in this piece for the Eclipse touring company, he focuses exclusively on black characters.

The action is set on a run-down estate in West London on a Bank Holiday Monday. The matriarch, Jean Vincent, has two grown-up sons and an errant drunk of a husband. One son, Stephen, is a successful lawyer and property developer, and is on the brink of being selected for a safe parliamentary seat.

The other, Frank, is the estate's hard man and local drug dealer, and about to go down for several years after the police discovered his stash. Before he does so, he wants to discover who tipped them off.

The play is at its strongest when exploring family relationships and festering resentments. There is something of Cain and Abel in the relationship between Frank and Stephen, although Williams is fascinatingly ambivalent about who is the worst villain of the piece.

Angel House is affecting, too, on the relationships between needy sons and inadequate fathers. Frank finds it almost impossible to talk to his son, especially after the boy confesses he is gay.

And another mixed-up teenager is bunking off school to look after his pathetically whining crack-head of a father, whose life has been ruined by Frank's supplies. Yet, in Williams's dramatic world, even the worst characters are capable of goodness, and even the apparently good ones have serious failings.

But Angel House nevertheless feels a touch schematic, and several of the characters don't fully earn their dramatic keep - most notably the character of the supposedly "good" brother, Stephen, who remains little more than a bland cipher until almost the end.

There are also ponderous accounts of the characters' histories, while the depiction of drug dealing and property development lacks persuasive detail. Williams does, however, manage to tie up most of his play's loose ends by the final scene.

Paulette Randall directs an absorbing, well-acted production, although Libby Watson's expressionistic set is more evocative of a war zone than a run-down London estate.

Mark Monero brings great charisma and strong hints of decency and vulnerability to Frank, but Richard Blackwood is unable fully to flesh out his more successful (if equally devious) brother.

Claire Benedict is both warm and touching as the matriarch, Geoff Aymer offers a delightful double as the two inadequate men in her life, while Chandra Ruegg, Curtis Cole and Tendayi Jembere all impress as a trio of damaged teenagers.

This might not be Williams at his best, but there is a manifest humanity here that you don't usually find in the bog-standard sink-estate drama.

Charles Spencer

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The Times, Wednesday 6 February 2008

Guess who most looks likely to break Alan Ayckbourn's record as the most prolific dramatist in Britain? Without doubt it's Roy Williams, who is busy penning commissioned plays for the National, the Royal Court, Out of Joint and the Almeida - where he is writer in residence - and the RSC, which is also about to revive his Iraq play, Days of Significance. How does he find time to eat, sleep, observe the passing scene or simply sit and listen to the British Caribbeans whose bard he has become?

Luckily he's also one of our ablest dramatists, capable of writing cracking dialogue. There's a scene between two bitter brothers in his new Angel House - which is en route to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Salisbury and Northampton, if you want another upmarket list - that couldn't have been better done by that specialist in fraternal angst, Sam Shepard. Yet there's a tiny, cavilling voice in my head that wonders if he's in danger of stretching his theatrical elastic to breaking point - or at least spreading himself a bit thinly.

Angel House is part of a London sink estate that's been bought and developed by Richard Blackwood's Stephen, who was brought up there in poverty by Claire Benedict's Jean, an immigrant from the West Indies abandoned by her feckless husband. Stephen is clever, politically ambitious and in every obvious way to be compared with his brother, Frank (Mark Monero), who is about to be imprisoned after a cache of weed was found in his living room. But which, really, is the good son and which the bad one?

The answer comes in that climactic quarrel in which resentments dating back to puberty and beyond are powerfully aired, and I can't reveal it without spoiling the play. Enough to say that it involves treachery, sacrifice and much else. The play's overriding purpose seems to be that love and hate are closely allied and that the first can transcend the second, an idea echoed elsewhere in Paulette Randall's production.

But here, perhaps, is where the evening begins to feel cluttered. The supporting characters include a violent drug dealer who cares a lot more than first appears for his troubled son and the gay boy who once had a mild fling with the same young man. It also seems that Stephen's father is actually the family friend who still wanly adores Jean, though Stephen himself never discovers a fact that anyway assumes less importance than it should. You persistently feel that there is more to be said about the characters and their relationships. Yet isn't that better than feeling that they outstay their welcome?

When Jean is talking to Geoff Aymer as the ageing swain who "loves you so much I hate you", or when the excellent Monero, as the thuggish but quietly heroic Frank, is battling Blackwood's slippery Stephen, you know that you're in the hands of a fine writer.

Benedict Nightingale

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Ipswich Advertiser, Thursday 7 February 2008

ROY Williams is fast becoming one of the country's most prolific playwrights and, for the second time, the New Wolsey is hosting the world premiere of one of his plays, this time Angel House.

Life on an inner city council estate is never going to be easy. For matriarch Jean, however, when one of your sons is a high-flying lawyer being groomed for a seat in local government and the other is the estate drug dealer trying to stay one step ahead of prison and the local gangs, life is somewhat more complicated.

Told through a series of short punchy scenes taking place throughout the estate, we learn how four groups of friends, relatives and neighbours are about to collide with dramatic consequences. While some of Williams' earlier works have concentrated on problems facing inner city youths, this is a true cross-generational exploration of events taking place on one Bank Holiday Monday.

Angel House is written as a true ensemble piece and, while audiences may recognise the faces of stand-up comic Richard Blackwood and EastEnders actor Mark Monero, it is the performance of Claire Benedict as Jean that stands out. Played with a combination of frailty, tempered with an inner steel, it is clear that this woman is the true power behind her extended family.

Director Paulette Randall makes good use of Libby Watson's simple but effective set and some of the lapses in pace on opening night will inevitably tighten up as the run progresses.

While some of the scenes would benefit from some revision and the ending somewhat peters out, this is, on the whole, a well-conceived production. Williams yet again proves that he has the ear for capturing modern inner city life.

GLEN PEARCE

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East Anglian Daily Times, Tuesday 5 February 2008

This is Roy Williams in epic mode, very different in style from his plays put on at the New Wolsey in the last couple years. The treatment of his themes - black aspiration and identity, family and community tensions - has been funny, outrageous, violent, and explosively energetic. In Angel House he's deeply thoughtful and reflective as he follows the routes towards tragedy, reconciliation and redemption.

Though the action all happens on August Bank Holiday Monday we follow the lives of three generations of a Jamaica family which came to Britain, to settle in a West London council housing estate. Angel House is the pretty derelict block of flats where the family has lived and some still do.

The two dominant family characters -two brothers - now show where aspiration has led them. Stephen (Richard Blackwood) is the smart, well off businessman about to buy and redevelop Angel House, no doubt making it too expensive for the people who've lived there for years to afford. He has all the attributes of success but an inability to make human contact that goes back to his childhood.

Mark Manero plays Frank, who's about to do a lengthy stretch for drug-dealing. The barons behind him are after whoever blagged to the police. Frank, realising the consequences, is now desperate to atone and, on this one day, to undo the peril into which he has put his family. The play becomes increasingly moving as we realise which way things are going and the two performances are very powerful and well judged.

In fact, director Paulette Randall has assembled a strong cast to tell the story. At the root is Claire Benedict as Jean, the family matriarch - middle-class, stylish, respectable god-fearing, still riddled with guilt that she nearly deserted her children and returned to Jamaica. One family difficulty though, and they don't know it, is that the brothers Stephen and Frank, have different fathers, both played by Geoff Aymer, an actor whose work I admired greatly at Frinton last summer. His Desmond is an earnest, mild and kindly uncle, while the other father, Jean's errant husband, Lloyd, is a rascally Barbadian.

Chandra Ruegg doubles up well as Stephen's undervalued new girlfriend. She's also part of the young trio of characters who have their generational problems - sexuality, truancy, victimisation, and knife culture - to cope with.

Roy Williams is an important British writer and we are fortunate to see his work in Ipswich.

Ivan Howlett

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