by Peter Shaffer

directed by Henrik Zawischa, February 2008

Cast

Brief Synopsis

Eccentric Lettice Duffet simply cannot settle for the ordinary. Even working as a tour guide at Fustian House, one of Britain’s more boring stately homes, cannot stop her creativity. Her experiences as the daughter of an actress who toured France with an all-girl troupe performing Shakespeare’s history plays, along with her enthusiasm for Elizabethan food and medieval weaponry, help her to inventively inform her tourists and liven up the house’s dull history. In her passion for the past, though, she begins to stray from fact and increasingly makes her tours more theatrical, much to the horror of dry and dour Lotte Schoen, a representative of the Preservation Trust.

She walks in a the height of Lettice’s extravagances, and Lettice suddenly finds herself without a job. But, bit by bit, the purist Lotte finds herself drawn into Lettice’s world of historical romance. The two discover they have more in common than meets the eye, and an unusual friendship grows. This is soon challenged, however, when during their re-enactment of Charles I’s execution a nasty little accident happens...

This witty and passionate comedy by the author of Equus and Amadeus won the Evening Standard’s Best Comedy Award in 1988 and was nominated for the Tony Award in 1990.

Director’s note

The decision to do Lettice and Lovage, a play that its author, Peter Shaffer, is said to have written especially for Maggie Smith, as not an easy one. So many people have seen it, so many people have ideas how it should be done. Could I ever imagine matching that? Could I find actors who would present it as well as the original cast id? Could I find a Maggie Smith? As I loved the piece from the first reading, I decided not to try at all, to ignore all this, to not check the internet for information about the original production, but to work just with the text and my own images to make this our own play, to do my best to make it a good, fresh play, not a copy.

On the surface Lettice and Lovage might seem to be just a comedy – it even has some quite clownesque sequences. So one could be tempted to do it as a slapstick piece, stay superficial and cheap. But there is more to it that I wanted to explore. It is also a play about the difficulty of being oneself in our modern world, of finding the courage not to function as expected. It is a plea for more beauty without glorifying old times. And also a praise of
friendship. So I tried to go beyond the comedy, and I hope I have succeeded in creating real, believable people.

Having said that, I must admit that there are other, not so nice elements, too. There is a certain xenophobic streak in what is said about the French and the so-called "Ottomites”. And the idea that terrorist attacks on ugly buildings might be an appropriate measure isn’t completely ruled out. I do not agree with these notions, but I decided to keep them as Peter Shaffer wrote them, decided not to sacrifice these parts of the text to excessive political correctness.

For me, such aspects are shades of the personality of the characters that help make them real – the xenophobic remarks are so exaggerated that we can see through them easily.
Meanwhile I have seen a scene of the original on YouTube, and I must say, I liked our version better. But that is something you, the audience, must decide in the end.

Henrik Zawischa