Latest news with #CharingCrossTheatre
Spectator
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The Daughter of Time was worth the wait
That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End. Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey's most unusual but brilliant detective story. It's her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg. And it's arguably her most brilliant because the crime he solves is one of British history's coldest and most high-profile cases – who murdered the Princes in the Tower in 1483. Yet while it's a brilliant book, because most of the action happens either inside Grant's head or in his hospital room, it has probably been judged undramatisable – until now. Playing at the Charing Cross Theatre just off Villiers Street, American playwright M. Kilburg Reedy's stage adaption takes Tey's classic and serves it up with a leavening Shakespearian twist. And what a historical tour de force it is. If you don't know your 15th-century history or House of York genealogy, you certainly will do after an evening here (the programme helpfully includes a family tree). We begin with Grant, who believes he can discern an individual's character through their face, so when his friend – glamorous actress Marta Hallard (played to the nines by Rachel Pickup) – brings him a selection of historical pictures to peruse, he becomes obsessed by the portrait of Richard III. This man doesn't resemble the devious hunchback of history who schemed his way to the throne and then had his nephews murdered in the Tower of London. If anything he looks cautious, thinks Grant (played with great bravura by Rob Pomfret) – sober, decent, more suited to the bench than the dock. So, since he's a detective and has nothing better to do, Grant embarks on a police-style investigation – complete with a board, map and pinned-up photographs of key individuals all connected with string – where with assistance from his sergeant (the excellent Sanya Adegbola) and a young lovelorn American named Brent Carradine (played by Harrison Sharpe, who nearly walks off with the show) he examines the contemporary and near-contemporary evidence for what really happened to the sons of Edward IV – namely Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York. What Grant discovers doesn't match up with what the traditional history and Tudor propagandists would have us believe. Chief among those propagandists was, of course, William Shakespeare. His history play Richard III was written in the early 1590s and was required to align with the sentiments of Elizabeth I, granddaughter of the man who defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 – Henry Tudor. Rarely in the history of drama (probably not until Alan Rickman gave us Hans Gruber in Die Hard, anyway) has such a delicious, vile but downright charismatic villain ever been conceived as the Bard's 'poisonous bunch-backed toad'. The problem is that the play Shakespeare wrote was mostly rubbish, based on a fishy narrative written by Thomas More in the 1510s. What Tey's book did so expertly was to take Thomas More's version and tear it to pieces, largely by drawing on records and evidence that was much closer to the events described than More ever was. In Reedy's stage play, the same meticulous dissection takes place; so what we get is a journey through historical evidence that exposes the inconsistencies and omissions of the sources and the evidence upon which Shakespeare concocted his version of Richard III. And it's a historical romp – one delivered with all the impassion vim of Simon Schama after his second round of Weetabix. Of course, since it's a dramatisation there are deviations from the original. First, Reedy has taken the implied romance between Grant and Marta Hallard from the book and turned it into a full-blown subplot, one which turns – irony of ironies – on an act of deception that could have graced the pages of a Shakespeare comedy. This however fits remarkably neatly with another change introduced by Reedy, which is to use a Shakespearian actor, Simon Templeton (played brilliantly by Noah Huntley), to give voice to the Tudor 'case' against Richard III. And it works. While Tey's original dialogue is flawless – and Reedy used as much of it as she could, she says – there is so much more to the play, and many more laughs than one would have expected too (thanks not least to the nurses played by Hafsa Abbasi and Janna Fox). For fans of the book, the most significant change to the story comes in the selection of the killer of the young princes. Drawing on original sources, the playwright has come to a different conclusion – but it's one which I think holds just as much water as Tey's prime suspect. It certainly works in the context of the play, even if there are many people around now who believe (based on sound evidence by the way) that both princes actually survived the reign of Richard III and didn't die at all in 1483. What would Tey have made of the playwright's handiwork? I'm not sure she would have approved of the romantic subplot, since she never chose to marry Grant off herself and she could have done in his last outing (The Singing Sands of 1952), published posthumously. But – and it's an important but – the rest of it, I think, is spot on. At the heart of her book is the very probable innocence of Richard III and the concomitant calumny done against him ever since, something this lively play brings indisputably to life. 'Truth is the daughter of time, not authority,' is the Francis Bacon quote that inspired the title. Time will tell if this is the play that finally gets Richard III off the historical naughty step. The Daughter of Time is at the Charing Cross Theatre until 13 September.
Telegraph
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Forget Agatha Christie, this is the real Queen of Crime
Agatha Christie has long been synonymous with the Golden Age of crime writing, that inter-war period when people sought comfort from easily solvable problems, prompting a boom in detective fiction. Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh completed the best-known quartet. But contemporary readers would have crowned someone else as the true Queen of crime: the Scottish writer Josephine Tey, whose novels stood out for their meticulous observations, dry, standoffish wit and her unique voice. Tey (a nom de plume) published a series of six meticulously crafted detective novels between 1929 and 1952: the first, The Man in the Queue, which introduced her shrewd but understated hero, Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard, was an instant critical hit. Now, a new theatrical version of The Daughter of Time, one of her later novels, is set to open at the Charing Cross Theatre – and to revive interest in the 20th century's real Queen of Crime. The groundbreaking novel sees Grant tackle one of the biggest puzzles to plague British history: who really killed the Princes in the Tower? Decades before the historian Philippa Langley would lead the charge to prove that Richard III did not orchestrate the 1483 murder of the two young British heirs, Tey's protagonist was on the – very – cold case. Laid up in a hospital bed, Grant needs something to relieve his boredom when a friend shows him a portrait of the 15th-century king. After staring at it for ages, he concludes: 'I can't remember any murderer, either in my own experience, or in case-histories, who resembled him.' And so he sets out to prove the Plantagenet king's innocence, in what was Tey's fifth novel featuring Grant. But Tey didn't only write great mysteries – her own life was one, too. She never gave interviews, describing herself to a friend as a 'lone wolf' and keeping her private life firmly under wraps. Born in Inverness in 1896, the eldest of three sisters, her real name was Elizabeth 'Beth' MacKintosh. Her father, Colin, was a greengrocer, whose own parents were illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters. Tey wasn't even her only pen name: her first novels were published as Gordon Daviot, which was also the name attached to most of her plays; she also used F Craigie Howe for a 1946 comedy at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre. From the age of 27, she lived a double life. She moved back to Inverness after her mother died, writing and looking after her father until his death in 1950, but would travel down on the sleeper train twice a year for a fortnight in London. There, she would become an entirely different character, swapping her dutiful Scottish life with its tweed skirts and cardigans for a glamorous London one. There was even a costume change: from Kings Cross she would go straight to Debenhams on Oxford Street, where she stored her London wardrobe, complete with furs. She stayed at the Cowdray, once the largest women's club in the world, on Cavendish Square, spending her days lunching with friends or at the races, and her evenings at the theatre. She even made it into Tatler: there is a 1934 photo of Tey on holiday with friends in Portmeirion, the Welsh coastal town. Tey never married although there were rumours of a lover who was lost during the First World War. Many of her thespian friends, who included the actress Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and her partner, Marda Vanne, were gay, prompting speculation about Tey's own sexuality. Vanne even confessed to having strong feelings for Tey, although these were not reciprocated. Author Val McDermid thinks Tey is the most interesting of the great female writers of the so-called Golden Age of crime writing – and deserves to be much better known. 'She is still an unknown quantity to lots of people,' McDermid tells me. 'People who haven't read her are missing out on some really good storytelling and on reading someone with a really incisive way of writing about character. She gets under the skin of her characters and writes about them vividly and also with humour, which was something that a lot of Golden Age writers didn't have.' Tey died of liver cancer aged 55 on 13 February 1952, leaving The Singing Sands to be published posthumously. The Times records the death of Gordon Daviot two days before the state funeral of George VI, whose life, death and majesty had filled the newspapers that week. She left most of her estate of £24,000 to the English National Trust – to spite her native Scotland, says McDermid. 'When she was starting out, the literary establishment in Scotland was very male and she was not made welcome. She felt that exclusion quite keenly. She wanted to leave her estate to further the beauty of the landscape she loved. And she was pissed off with Scotland.' Tey's life has remained as mysterious as her fiction. The author Nicola Upson abandoned an attempt to write a biography because she couldn't find out enough about her life. Instead, Upson started writing a series of detective novels featuring a protagonist called Josephine Tey, who has a female partner. 'From the letters I've read, her most important relationships were with women,' Upson has said, by way of justification. Even John Gielgud, a close friend, didn't really know Tey. In an introduction to her 1953 collection of her plays he wrote, 'We were friends until her death last year – 1952 – and yet I cannot claim ever to have known her very intimately… She never spoke to me of her youth and her ambitions. It was hard to draw her out. It was difficult to tell what she really felt, since she did not readily give her confidence, even to her few intimate friends.' The Daughter of Time runs at Charing Cross Theatre from July 18 to September 13. The five best Josephine Tey novels – ranked 5. The Man in the Queue (1929) Tey introduces Inspector Grant in what is probably her most straightforward example of the whodunnit genre. This stands out among her crime writing contemporaries for the quality of its prose. Buy the book 4. To Love and Be Wise (1950) Tey sends Grant to a remote English village to investigate the disappearance of a Hollywood photographer, setting up a cleverly constructed narrative that explores questions of sexuality and gender identity in ways that were unique at the time. Buy the book 3. The Daughter of Time (1951) Widely perceived as her masterpiece, this is a must-read for any budding historians. Tey uses an ingenious device – getting her detective, Grant, to investigate a case from centuries ago – but the result is somewhat over-expository. Buy the book 2. Brat Farrar (1949) One for horse lovers, this is based, in part, on the real-life Tichborne case, which saw an imposter pose as a missing heir. In Tey's version, a young man is persuaded into impersonating a missing twin in an upper-class family in order to inherit the estate. Combines humour, melodrama and a cracking narrative. Buy the book 1. The Singing Sands (1952) Published posthumously, this is Tey at her crisp, wry best. Inspector Grant is suffering from burnout, so she sends him to the Scottish Highlands for some rest and recuperation, but after a dead body is discovered on the sleeper train, he winds up working. Tey has fun mocking Scottish nationalists. Buy the book
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Panto favourites set for return to Darlington stage for third season
Pantomime favourites Josh Benson and Jamie Jones are set to return to the Darlington Hippodrome for a third pantomime season - joining the circus as Joey the Clown and Dame Betty Barnum in a production of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The pair will be joined on stage by Brendan Cole. The former Strictly Come Dancing professional, who appeared on every season of that show from 2004 through to 2017, will be taking on the role of the evil ringmaster, Baron Von Bolshoi. Mr Benson has performed at venues including Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, London's Charing Cross Theatre, and the Phoenix Arts Club. He is also a regular at the Brick Lane Music Hall and previously appeared as the pantomime comic at Chesterfield's Pomegranate Theatre, York Theatre Royal, and Halifax's Victoria Theatre. He said: "I can't wait to be back with my 'panto gang' at the Hippodrome for a hat-trick season. "Darlington audiences are so much fun to perform for… and I'm so excited to be bringing them some more daft antics this Christmas." Mr Jones graduated from Staffordshire University with a first-class honours degree in musical theatre, and is also a writer and director for various production companies across the UK. He said: "I'm absolutely thrilled to be returning to the beautiful Darlington Hippodrome this Christmas as Dame Betty Barnum in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. "Expect fabulous costumes, sumptuous scenery, and laugh out loud comedy. "This year's show promises to be one of Darlington's biggest yet, so come and join us in the Big Top for some festive panto magic." READ MORE: Embrace's Danny McNamara on 30 years of music in Darlington Roger L Jackson Ghostface from Scream review County Durham film Nominate your favourite farm, deli or butcher in Echo competition Darlington Hippodrome will be transformed into a circus for four weeks, with a show packed with comedy, special effects, stunts, and circus acts. Goldilocks and the Three Bears will run from Friday, December 5 to Wednesday, December 31, 2025. For full details or to book, please call the Box Office on 01325 405405 or visit
