UNITED KINGDOM: PREMIERE OF PLAY "A BUSY DAY" WRITTEN BY 18TH CENTURY AUTHOR FANNY BURNEY BUT NEVER PERFORMED IN HER LIFETIME

Record ID: 389842

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: PREMIERE OF PLAY "A BUSY DAY" WRITTEN BY 18TH CENTURY AUTHOR FANNY BURNEY BUT NEVER PERFORMED IN HER LIFETIME
  • Date: 8th June 2000
  • Summary: VARIOUS, SARAH CROWE AND STEPHANIE BEACHAM PERFORMING FOR PHOTOGRAPHERS (4 SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 23rd June 2000 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LONDON, UK
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Entertainment,General
  • Reuters ID: LVA1G3AS2QTRDFJ5OA6M1K5O69SE
  • Story Text: The latest comedy to debut in London's West End is a "A Busy Day", but this is a premiere with a difference, written two hundred years ago by novelist and diarist Fanny Burney, it has never before been performed on the London stage.
    Fanny Burney led a long and colourful life, whether by luck or accident, she seemed always to be at the hub of the social and political scene.
    A prolific writer, her diaries describe the colourful life of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London.
    Her account of being chased round Kew Gardens by George III was memorably created on film in the award winning "The Madness of King George".
    Published shortly after her death in 1840, her journals have never been out of print. Despite the fact that she enjoyed considerable success as a novelist, her greatest aspiration was to be a dramatist - an occupation deemed unsuitable for a woman at the time.
    Although Sheridan personally offered to stage any play she wrote at Drury Lane, but Fanny's her father was so against it - he made sure Sheridan never even got the chance to read his daughter's scripts.
    "A Busy Day" was begun in about 1800, and while writing it she moved to France to be with her French husband, Monsieur D'Arblay.
    He had returned to France hoping to recover his family fortunes which were lost in the French Revolution. But whilst she was there, war broke out once more between Britain and France. Her return to London was delayed by over a decade, and as a result she lost her valuable theatre contacts - the play was never performed.
    It's first public performances didn't take place, until the early 1990's in Bristol, and now eventually, two hundred years after it was begun, "A Busy Day" is making it's West End debut.
    A finely tuned comedy of class division, the play pokes fun at the aristocracy and the nouveau riche alike.
    Stephanie Beacham plays a rather formidable member of the upper classes.
    "Lady Will, I think that probably sums her up, she has, she's a rather Thatcherite character really, she's absolutely impossible, she's right wing, so far right that you've fallen off this planet, she's a snob. Fanny Burney, the writer, obviously was pretty tired of any excesses in social standing, and thought it very silly if people thought too well of the aristocracy, or too well of themselves in any way, and her heroines and heroes are of a more modern...I'm not modern, I'm of the old guard."
    Although the play was written two centuries ago, for comedian Ben Moor, who plays a foppish "nice but dim"
    aristocrat, the social comedy that Fanny Burney draws can still be seen in today's society.
    "The great thing about this play is it's just as relevant today, London is exactly the same city, with exactly the same class comedy and divisions and that sort of thing, so it's still relevant, and I think that's the great thing about great drama, although this was written 200 years ago, for a modern audience they will laugh with recognition at everything, so if I was going to write something set in the past, I think it could still be very modern."
    The play is performed by a strong ensemble cast, including Sarah Crowe, best known to British audiences for her appearances in a long-running series of television adverts.
    Crowe relishes the chance to perform on stage: "I really love it, you can't beat a live audience, as they say, and they are the real x-factor in a comedy, and they are different every night, so really they make it what it is." Question - is it nerve-wracking? "Yes, it's as close as I am ever going get to surgery."
    Period dramas, both on film and television, have become a familiar part of viewing fare, there have been a plethora of filmed adaptations of historical novels, most notably the works of Jane Austen, but director Jonathan Church, was keen to bring to life the the works one of Austen's predecessors.
    "I think what's interesting academically about it is Fanny Burney who wrote it was a forerunner of Jane Austen, in fact, "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility" two of Jane Austen best known titles, the titles are picked, are quotations from Fanny Burney's work, so you are looking a little further back into history, and the other thing that I think is different is that it's a comedy, and the audience gives it that extra dimension, and to see a two hundred year old play making an audience laugh, you can't get that feeling on television."
    "A Busy Day opens at London's Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue on Monday 19th June.
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