WATCH: Betty Blue Eyes will take us back to austerity Britain in Horsham
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HAODS chairman Tess Kennedy said: “The committee put three shows to the members to choose from and the top one goes through. It was Anything Goes that won but then they announced a professional show, in the West End I think, and that meant that we couldn't get the licence so Betty Blue Eyes was the runner-up and that's what we are doing, but actually it was quite close. I've never seen the West End production but lots of people have told me it was a fantastic show and a massive crowd success.”
Betty Blue Eyes is a musical adaptation of the 1984 film A Private Function and features music by George Stiles with lyrics by Anthony Drewe. The book was written for the stage by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, adapted from Alan Bennett's original screenplay.
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Hide AdIt is 1947, belts are being tightened and the country’s long-suffering citizens are being told by the government that there will be fair shares for all in return for surviving austerity Britain. Meanwhile local officials feather their own nests by taking far more than their own fair share… Tess is playing the lead, Joyce: “Joyce is a bit like Keeping Up Appearances in that she wants to live a champagne life on brown ale money. She wants high status and everything is about status to her. She is really, really horrible to her husband all the time because he had promised her that her future would live up to her past. She had quite a middle-class upbringing and now she's very much in a working class situation. She is extremely unpleasant. She fawns on everybody else. She wants to be part of their society, all the middle-class women that she meets and she really tries to ingratiate herself.
“It is set in austerity Britain. It is set in 1947 and there is still rationing and the country is in a slump and really struggling. Everybody is having a difficult time. It's all about opposing the government and you can't even get a rasher of bacon. There are parallels with now with the cost of living crisis. It's the same thing but in this there are multiple women whose husbands hadn't come back from the war and everybody is simply trying to survive.”
The production comes as the company is facing a rather uncertain future with the lease up on their current rehearsal space, the old ambulance station, later this year, after which they will be effectively homeless: “I'm extremely worried. We had a home on a site where Tesco's was long before Tesco's was built and the council wanted the land to build on. We had a gentlemen's agreement with the council that they would always home us. Hence we went into the old ambulance station, but now the lease is up. It doesn't have to be the council but they promised that they would help. We make a lot of money for them through the theatre and we put on lots of community events so really it's a moral obligation. There's no legal obligation but it's a moral obligation because we gave up our land for them. I'm building up a sub-committee to try and see what we can do. We are looking for other premises but it is definitely worrying.”