A hapless TV comic hopes to laugh all the way to the bank when he’s courted by financial execs promising fat fees and star treatment in Masquerade’s production of Joe Penhall’s Dumb Show opening at St James Cavalier on 2 June. Hypocrisy has never been more hilarious than in this take-no-prisoners probe of the vice of our age – celebrity. Ripped from the headlines then stretched for effect, Dumb Show is a contemporary tale of table-turning and role reversal.
Consistently lauded for his razor-sharp dialogue, Joe Penhall writes for both stage and screen. His play Blue/Orange about a mental patient who claims he is the son of an African dictator swept the British theatre awards and Penhall was hand-picked by Ian McEwan to write the screenplay for McEwan’s novel Enduring Love.
After working as a journalist, Penhall joined the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers Programme, where he wrote his first play Some Voices, which premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs, as did his next offering, Pale Horse, the following season. Love and Understanding and The Bullet soon followed. Penhall then became a writer-in-residence at Royal National Theatre, where he wrote Blue/Orange.
The play, which was produced at the National in 2000 and transferred to the West End and Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company, won the 2000 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year, the Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play, and the 2001 Olivier Award. Penhall has also adapted his writing for the screen with Blue/Orange and Some Voices, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. In addition to the screenplay for Enduring Love, he wrote the four part crime drama The Long Firm for the BBC which was nominated for a British Academy Award. Dumb Show premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2004. Penhall’s Some Voices is playing at Orange County’s Rude Guerrilla Theatre from 16-24 September 2005 (www.rudeguerrilla.org).
Directing Dumb Show is Liz Yates. Liz was involved in theatre in the UK from an early age and has worked as a director, teacher and performer both in the UK, including work at The Edinburgh Fringe, and abroad. She began her professional career as Director of Youth Theatre at The Redgrave Theatre in Surrey.
She has worked on a variety of projects in a freelance capacity including at The Chichester Festival Theatre, The National Association of Youth Theatre Festival and The Henley Festival, Henley on Thames. In 2000 she was commissioned to devise a show for the Pentecost 2000 Festival in Cheltenham and in 2001 worked as Acting Coach for Good Company’s UK tour of Strange Kind of Hero. As a director, credits include: Blood Wedding (UK and Spain), Agamemnon and The Trial (Norden Farm Centre for the Arts, Maidenhead) as well as The Crossing Path (Ustinov Studio, Bath).