Production Notes for A Dulditch Angel

Welcome to A Dulditch Angel, a show with its roots in Norfolk but its flower appearing anywhere from Sheringham Little Theatre to London’s Gatehouse Theatre in Highgate.

Orla first asked me if she could direct a show for us in 2001 after I’d met her at The Gate Theatre in London where she was working with Fred Meller and Ben Harrison, who were the team behind A Warning to the Curious. However she was then swept under the wing of Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse and helped transfer his shows to New York. Why this should have appealed more than touring East Anglia I really can’t fathom. However, she wrote to me from the Big Apple to say she was still interested and could we talk when she returned. By this time the National had recruited her as a staff director, but she still wanted a show of her own and said she’d discovered a writer called Mary Mann who intrigued her.

I already knew of the work of Mary Mann, who wrote around the turn of the century about a village she called Dulditch and the harsh lives of those who inhabited the place. Personally I was trying to get away from nineteenth century farm labourers, on which I felt I had overdosed recently, but I had one of Mary Mann's stories in a recent anthology, and one reading took my breath away.  We started looking for more, a task which proved a lot more difficult than I expected. My heart began to sink. Surely there would be a reason why she had disappeared even from the library shelves? But Norfolk library had a hidden cache and revealed its riches at the stroke of a keyboard. (All this stuff about libraries having no books is hogwash; the trick is to wrench open their Reserve stock!) If one story took my breath away, the collection Fields of Dulditch brought me out in goose pimples and then made me very angry. Why wasn’t she on every local school syllabus, or published by Penguin or at least in the Virago catalogue? Although she’s often called the East Anglian Thomas Hardy, she seems closer in fact to the playwright J.M. Synge who went out to the Aran Islands, listened to the local patois and then constructed a series of plays around them. For Mary Mann, although born in Norfolk, was certainly not a native when she went out to Shropham with her new husband, and clearly found it a world that shook her own to the foundations.

However her ability to capture the Norfolk accent on paper, without the awful tweeness of the current vogue for mardling stories in local magazines and newspapers, is without parallel in literature.

Orla brought Steven Canny on board to write the play, and together they have brought a completely fresh approach to this new-found treasure. In my own work on the local horsemen, in The Reapers Year and Bone Harvest, I have mined this seam several times, and so I was more than happy to stand back and see an alternative view of the ground-down labouring class of this region make its way to the stage and shake loose all those old stereotypes of before.

And talking of unearthed treasure, in the spring we are remounting our production of The Sutton Hoo Mob, and we are looking for a sponsor. It’s your chance to see your company's name all over the region and in front of our growing audience, particularly at the Pride of Place festival in Ipswich and Woodbridge at the end of March. See opposite for more details of the Festival and put the dates in your diaries now! It's an opportunity to see 10 different theatre companies from the UK and beyond.

Once again we must thank One for sponsoring our autumn show. We hope you enjoy it and are always pleased to have your comments, either in writing or via our new-look website at www.easternangles.co.uk

Ivan Cutting - Artistic Director