News

Alistair McGowan makes his directing debut at the Guildhall with Semi-Monde

17.03.08

Guildhall School actors present Noel Coward's rarely-performed gem directed by alumnus McGowan

Alistair McGowan is best known for work as a comedian on television programmes including They Think it's all Over, Have I Got News for You? and his acclaimed celebrity-impersonation series for BBC 1, The Big Impression. Aside from television he has also worked extensively in theatre with starring roles in Endgame, Art, and Little Shop of Horrors. An alumnus of the Guildhall School (Acting 1989) he returns to make his directorial debut in a production of Noël Coward's classic comedy Semi-Monde.

Semi-Monde is easily the most visually daring of Noel Coward's comedies, and the most intellectually startling. Written in 1926 and originally entitled Ritz Bar, it paints a vivid picture of the extravagance and debauchery of high society England. The action of the play takes place in the various different restaurants and bars of a fashionable hotel where, as Coward puts it, the elite 'shared their apartments and their lives with members of the opposite, or the same, sex and no wife dreamed for one instant of doing anything so banal as living with her husband.'

With open references to homosexuality, that Coward himself knew would never pass the strict censorship of the time, it was never professionally staged in Coward's lifetime. The play received its premiere at the Citizen's Theatre, Glasgow, in September 1977 but has remained a rarely-performed gem of Coward's play-writing legacy.

Unreserved tickets: £7 (£3.50 concessions, Guildhall staff & students, Equity) available from the Barbican Box Office 020 7638 8891 (www.barbican.org.uk) from 7 March. Group discount available (020 7382 7211)

For further press information please contact:
Dvora Lewis Public Relations
Tel: 020 7435 9257 Email: dlpr@dvoralewis.com

The Guildhall School is provided by the City of London Corporation