Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House
133. Beyond Theatre - with Robert Bathurst and Trish Wadley
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Episode notes
We’re at The Coach and Horses in Soho with actor Robert Bathurst, much loved for his roles as David Marsden in Cold Feet, and Mark Taylor in Joking Apart, and with theatre producer Trish Wadley. Robert is reprising his title role in Keith Waterhouse’s Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and tells us what fun it is to perform in the very venue where the late Jeffrey Bernard spent much of his later years propping up the bar.
Trish Wadley has long championed immersive theatre, staging the Tennessee Williams hotel plays in three different rooms in a Holborn hotel before transferring them to the Langham Hilton. She’s the first producer ever to stage a play inside London’s Natural History Museum and persuaded them to build a 350-seat venue for a play about Charles Darwin. She also staged Insignificance, about an imaginary meeting between Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein in a Fifth Avenue hotel - in a Fifth Avenue hotel room. Ever inventive, her company Trish Wadley Productions has just produced a lean, mean, fast and furious version of Othello with Iago’s complex and conniving character played by three actors on the stage at the same time.
Trish and Robert enthuse about how liberating and interesting it is for audiences and performers alike to be outside the restrictions of conventional theatre. And if Robert’s stories are anything to go by, playing Jeffrey Bernard in The Coach and Horses has its fair shares of excitements and hazards too.
Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell plays at the Coach and Horses until 21st November http://www.defibrillatortheatre.com