A Day By The Sea
by N.C. Hunter
by N.C. Hunter
A Day by the Sea is a delicate and poetic play that explores themes of loss, shattered ambitions, and personal isolation among an English group of characters in post-war Dorset.
About The Play
About The Play
Presented as a companion piece to Nicholas de Jongh’s Plague Over England, A Day by the Sea is the play that Sir John Gielgud was performing in when he arrested in a Chelsea public lavatory, breaking the great taboo of public discussion of homosexuality.
N. C. Hunter has been called ‘the English Chekhov’, and this delicate, poetic, autumnal play captures a Chekhovian sense of loss, shattered ambitions and personal isolation, but amongst a distinctly English group of characters. Set in Dorset after the Second World War, A Day by the Sea is both gently comic and profoundly tragic – this precise and psychological play is a historical missing link between the well made plays of Rattigan and Coward and the theatrical revolution of 1956 with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.
The play was a hit at the Haymarket Theatre in 1953, directed by and starring Gielgud with Ralph Richardson, Irene Worth, Sybil Thorndike, and Lewis Casson. The Broadway production in 1955 was directed by Sir Cedric Hardwicke with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. It has also been produced for BBC Radio with Sir Michael Hordern, Richard Pasco, and Barbara Leigh Hunt.
Image: Anthony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ photographed by Andrew Dunn.
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