New season attractions at the People’s
Coming our way… comedy, tragedy and the winner of the People’s Play Award
The People’s Theatre has announced its spring/summer season, which is heartening considering it has begun the year with a cull of acting talent in the Agatha Christie thriller And Then There Were None.
Audiences at this 2025 opener – Christie is something of a new year tradition – have been seeing characters invited to a remote island by a mysterious host bumped off one by one in accordance with a nasty old rhyme.
From an audience’s perspective it’s hardly uplifting. Any humour is only of the very blackest kind and probably unintended. Agatha Christie plotted in the way people do crosswords or sudoku, cheered by neat resolutions rather than human emotions.
But even if the characters all come to a sticky end, the actors were all there to take a final bow. So what’s in store for the amateur thespians and those of us who bother the box office?
The new season begins after the February 10-15 production of Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed Top Girls, written during and inspired by the Thatcher years.
Who better than Shakespeare to get things under way, albeit at lightning speed. The Young People’s Theatre race through reduced versions of four of his famous plays, including Tom Stoppard’s Fifteen Minute Hamlet which has either been ruthlessly cut or the cast will speak very, very fast.
We shall see. Shakespeare Shorts is a Studio Theatre attraction from February 20-22.
It’s followed by Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen (March 4-8) which is described as a savagely comic exploration of justice and punishment and is 10 years old this year, having been premiered at London’s Royal Court.
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Sounding like one for strong stomachs, it won the 2016 Olivier Award as best new play.
Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, an early friend of the People’s (they regularly performed his plays when he was alive and he’d sometimes come and see them), needs no introduction. It spawned the musical My Fair Lady and should find an audience from March 18-22.
Then comes Goodnight Mister Tom, a moving story of the relationship between a young evacuee and the old man who gives him house room during the early months of the Second World War.
David Wood adapted Michelle Magorian’s 1981 novel to great effect and there will be the odd tear shed if it’s done properly here. Catch it from April 1-5 on the main stage.
Next up is something completely new.
Sides, by Bolton writer Alex Joynes, is the winner of this year’s biennial People’s Play Award (and therefore following in the footsteps of Peter Straughan, screenwriter of hit film Conclave, whose co-written A Rhyme for Orange won in 1997).
Running in the Studio Theatre from May 5-10, it tells of three characters, Terry, Charlie and Beth, and is set in a sandwich shop called Uncle Del’s.
Then comes Steel Magnolias with more good parts for women. Robert Harling’s 1987 play tells of a tight-knit group of female friends who bond at a small-town beauty salon in Louisiana.
It was released as a film in 1989 with a starry cast including Julia Roberts and Dolly Parton and later made it onto TV. See it on the People’s main stage from June 10-14.
Last but not least comes Waiting for God which made the reverse trip, starting as a BBC TV sitcom in 1990 and then turning up on the stage, but with writer Michael Aitkens penning both versions.
Set in a retirement village, it shows that advancing years are no guarantee of a more mellow approach to life.
As one of the characters remarks: “If there was any justice, instead of farting about on Saga cruises we would be doing loads of drugs and bonking ourselves into oblivion!”
Find details of all these in the brochure or on the People’s Theatre website. And Then There Were None runs until Saturday, January 18.