NEWS

2006/2007 Amy's View Felicity Kendal A brilliant social comedy and passionate family drama, Amy's View makes its long-awaited return to the West End stage. A decade ago, the play dazzled audiences at the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway. Now Felicity Kendal leads a stellar cast, including Jenna Russell, fresh from her triumphs in Sunday in the Park with George and Guys and Dolls, into the Garrick Theatre. Although the Lloyds financial scandal has left West End actress Esme (Felicity Kendal) penniless and her daughter (Jenna Russell) has been abandoned by her media tycoon husband, Any still believes that love conquers all. Confronted by the greatest tragedy of all, Esme is not so sure.... Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross Road By David Hare Directed by Peter Hall Close February 17 2007 'Felicity Kendal.... the performance of a lifetime' Independent on Sunday 'Sensational' Evening Standard 'Fabulous' Daily Mail 'Wonderful' Independent 'A superb star performance' Daily Telegraph December 2005 The much awaited third series of Felicity's t.v. show Rosemary & Thyme returns to British screens with a Christmas Special on Friday 23rd on ITV1.....details to follow. April 2004 Due to problems with our previous ISP we have had to change our Email address. Details can be found on the contact page. Due to these technical problems if you have written to us in the past your details will have be erased so if you are awaiting a reply from us, please write again using the new address. Thank you! Felicity is current working on the new series of Rosemary and Thyme and it is hoped that it will be ready for transmission later on this year. November 2003/February 2004 THEATRE ROYAL BATH PRODUCTIONS presents FELICITY KENDAL in Samuel Beckett’s HAPPY DAYS Directed by Peter Hall “There is no play of the twentieth century I find more marvelous” Financial Times “One of the great masterpieces of post-war theatre” Independent The image of faded beauty, Winnie, buried up to her waist in sand is one of the most compelling in modern theatre. Happy Days is the story of an eternal optimist facing the harsh realities of life with a smile, endless chatter and an enduring cheerfulness. With her handbag at her side and her husband Willie nearby, she never allows a day to pass without looking her best and hoping for better. One of Britain’s most popular stars joins an illustrious line up of great actresses who have played Winnie in Beckett’s sublime. Written in Paris in 1961, Nobel-Prize winning Beckett is the author of Waiting For Godot, Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape and has been acclaimed as one of the greatest writers of our time. WHAT THE CRITICS SAID: By Paul Taylor of The Independent. This is an evening that reverberates with theatrical memories. In 1976, Peter Hall inaugurated the National Theatre’s new building on the South Bank with an acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, starring Peggy Ashcroft. Now, a quarter of a century on, he is having a second stab at this dramatic masterpiece at the Arts Theatre. And that just happens to be the very venue where, in 1955, he directed the landmark English premiere of Waiting for Godot, the Beckett play that offered a groundbreaking demonstration of (in Tynan’s words at the time) “how much drama can do without and still exist”. For this expert and loving re-examination of Happy Days, he has cast Felicity Kendal as Winnie, the woman who is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth in the first act and - for such is progress - up to her neck in the second. With a striking set by his daughter Lucy, Hall reinvigorates the shock value of that (by now) classic metaphor for life as a process of gradual entombment. We are presented here with a more intrusive, aerial perspective on Winnie than normal. She juts out from the centre of a tilted-up spiral of sparsely tussocked earth that looks like the electric ring of a Baby Belling cooker as magnified and re-imagined by the Surrealist movement. But this stage picture sets up a clever false expectation, for, despite appearances, this is not a play or a production that affords you the right to look down on its protagonist. Kendal is a very English actress, but I’m delighted to report that she very convincingly affects the Irish accent written into the speech rhythms of Winnie’s near-monologue and its often comically cock-eyed logic (“What is that unforgettable line?”). Some interpreters of the role keep us guessing longer about the level of the heroine’s self-deception. As she struggles to fend off her growing fear of extinction, is it foolishness or genuine courage that keeps Winnie babbling on about her blessings and seeming to relish those daily toilet routines and rituals whereby she strives to maintain her genteel standards? That tactic brings out the play’s strong affinities with A Woman of No Importance, Alan Bennett’s great TV monologue for Patricia Routledge - another piece in which the silly self-flattery of the heroine comes to seem, by the end, a brave strategy for remaining stoic before the world’s indifference and death’s inevitability. But, in her very moving performance, Kendal allows you to hear, almost from the start, the gasping panic under Winnie’s bright protestations, and to see the emotional cost of continually having to heave herself back into a mode of ladylike graciousness. Pale, drawn, delicate but doughty, she alerts you to how the character’s clichéd clutchings at optimism tend to be curiously qualified. “This will have been another happy day! [Pause.] After all. [Pause.] So far.” The steady way that, with each phrase, confidence leaks out of that already peculiar declaration is both hilarious and heartbreaking. If she worries about the death of her neglectful, mobile but largely speechless husband, Willie, this haunting Winnie audibly dreads the day that the words and the increasingly tattered snatches of poetry and song that keep her going will run out. Nearly 50 years since he directed his first Beckett, Hall proves once again that there is no finer conductor of this playwright’s punctiliously precise verbal music and that no dramatist is as paradoxically life-affirming. Benedict Nightingale of The Times. THE heroine or anti-heroine of Beckett’s Happy Days is supposed to spend the evening buried in earth, first up to her waist, then up to her neck; but Peter Hall’s revival of the play adds to the impression of discomfort by tilting her weird habitat until it is no longer horizontal. At the Arts, Felicity Kendal’s Winnie peers vertically out of a whorl of scrubby turf that itself resembles an archaeological dig and makes her look like some shiny old statue, surprised to have been uncovered. That is not to say that there is anything statuesque, stony or inhuman about Kendal’s performance. Indeed, I’d rate it as one of her best, adopted Irish accent and all. The face beneath the greying curls and above the pinkish petticoat is slightly puffy. The voice trills with phony optimism, then suddenly breaks with unaffected, irrepressible sorrow. She is tougher and a bit brasher than I recall Peggy Ashcroft being in the role — I don’t think that dame spat out her morning toothpaste with quite such fierce relish — but no less touching and purposeful. So what is the purpose? Billie Whitelaw, maybe the finest of all Winnies, summed it up when she said that the play was about “getting on with it, getting through the day, trying not to be too depressed, and needing people, if only to shout at. You brush your teeth, fuss and gabble, do your hair, jabber and babble a lot more, nag your husband, remember this and that, and keep reassuring yourself that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. That’s Winnie.” That is how Beckett saw his self-deluded fellow creatures coping with their physical aches and emotional pains in 1962, when he wrote the play, and that is how he was still seeing them when he died in 1989. Bleak stuff? Yes, I suppose so, but also drolly humorous and, for a man, somewhat disturbing. If Winnie is the archetypal wife or woman, trapped in domestic tedium, the archetypal male or husband is Willie, who spends most of the play outside Winnie’s reach, reading his news-paper, eating his snot, mumbling the odd few syllables, and holding his smelly old tail as he crawls into what she calls his “hole”. As Whitelaw also said to me, “How many marriages do we know like that? And how many people?” At the Arts, Col Farrell plays Willie as well as so unrewarding a role can be played. “Castrated male swine, reared for slaughter,” he says when the unstoppably garrulous Winnie asks him the definition of “hog”, and he might be talking of himself. “Oh, this is a happy day,” cries Winnie, thrilled that he is speaking to her, and Kendal catches all the mad, illogical resilience that Beckett attributed to the character — and to very many of us. November 2003 Felicity is to start filming the second series of Rosemary & Thyme in March 2004. This time sees the crime-busting duo visit a couple of places in Europe to work on gardens belonging to ex-pats and unearth more than they bargined for! More details as they become available. September 2003 Felicity is to star as Winnie in the revival of Samuel Beckett's play HAPPY DAYS at the Arts Theatre, London in November. Opening night is on November 18th and the play is directed by Sir Peter Hall. More details as they become available. August 2003 The offical site for Felicity's new television series Rosemary & Thyme will be going live later this month. It will contain a lot of information about the show including background stories of the show and exclusive pictures. It will also carry a link to to this site. Find the site at: http://www.rosemaryandthyme.tv/ June 2003 Felicity finishes filming Rosemary and Thyme this month. Filming has been around the counties of Hampshire and Surrey. It looks as if it will reach British screens now late 2003.