Production Notes for The Last Laugh

Welcome to our 21^st year of touring, the 21^st birthday of Eastern Angles, and to The Last Laugh by James Vollmar.

More about the 21^st celebrations in a minute: first the play you are going to see tonight. Jim wrote Crossroad Blues for us two years ago and it went down so well with our audiences that we had to commission him again. He came back with an idea that at first rather perplexed me: “the search for a mythical Jewish comic”. What’s that got to do with East Anglia? I exclaimed, probably throwing my hands wide in a gesture that would not have been unfamiliar to a thousand Jewish comic impressions. But the more we delved together into  the background and the more Jim fleshed out his ideas, the more pertinent it became. We hope you think so.

Sometimes, living in the midst of “the enemy”, as Uncle Leo describes us, can bestow an objectivity that we should treasure. After all one of the greatest analysts of our essentially white Northern forbears was a descendant of the very race that got kicked out, the Welsh. I am of course talking about George Ewart Evans, whose linguistic archaeology and curatorial diggings into the horseman’s magic rituals laid the ground for The Reapers Year trilogy we have mined so exhaustively over the last twenty years. This has comprised the two stage versions of The Reapers Year itself (plus a radio play), then Days of Plenty and now Bone Harvest, which we will be touring into tithe barns in the summer. Just as with Days Of Plenty, you will need no knowledge of the earlier shows to enjoy this latest production, although anyone who has seen them will be intrigued to see the way we have climaxed the story of this family on the land.

In the meantime we are also re-mounting our famous production of David Copperfield for a national tour. There are only a few local performances, so you must make sure you are signed up to our mailing list if you want to be informed of them.

In August we will be having a big party at Woodbridge Community Hall, where we premiered our very first full scale production, Marsh Fever, the story of the ghost dog Black Shuck, on April 29 1982. That year we also produced our musical documentary When The Boats Came In, giving us a lifelong relationship with Lowestoft and the herring fishing industry. We’ll be singing some of those songs at our special party. If you want an invitation you will need to join our Friends or become one of our “Angels”.

We are particularly delighted to welcome Ryan Insurance as brand new sponsors of the company on this tour, for their Director Tim Ryan identifies our mutual East Anglian roots as a contributory factor in forming this new partnership.

I will write about more of the 21 years in future programmes this year. It looks like being a very special year. We hope you will join us on the way.

Ivan Cutting - Artistic Director