Plague Over England

Subsequently transferred to the Duchess Theatre in the West End from 11 February – 2 May 2009

Directed by Tamara Harvey
Designed by Alex Marker
Costume Design by Trish Wilkinson
Lighting by James Farncombe
Original Music by Alexander S. Bermange
Sound Design by Theo Holloway
Produced by Bill Kenwright and Ambassador Theatre Group.
Cast includes: Michael Brown. David Burt. Simon Dutton. Michael Feast. Steven Hansell. Sam Heughan. Celia Imrie. Hugh Ross. John Warnaby.

★★★★ Four Stars, The Times
★★★★ Four Stars, The Guardian
★★★★ Four Stars, Daily Express
★★★★ Four Stars, The Sunday Times
★★★★ Four Stars, The Mail on Sunday
★★★★ Four Stars, The Sunday Telegraph
★★★★ Four Stars, The Sunday Express
★★★★ Four Stars, Time Out
The Finborough Theatre production of Plague Over England was nominated for Best Off-West End production in the 2009 Whatsonstage Awards

A controversial new play by Evening Standard theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh launches the Finborough Theatre’s Spring Season 2008. Directed by Tamara Harvey, Jasper Britton plays Sir John Gielgud – together with Olivier Award nominee David Burt, Simon Dutton, and Olivier Award winner Nichola McAuliffe.

In Autumn 1953, Sir John Gielgud, then at the height of his fame as an actor, was arrested in a Chelsea public lavatory. He pleaded guilty the following morning to the charge of persistently importuning men for immoral purposes. Poised to appear in the West End in a play he was directing and recently knighted, Gielgud’s conviction caused a sensation, threatened the continuation of his career and helped break the great taboo upon general discussion in the national press of homosexuality. A great national debate began with The Observer accusing those who spoke out against Sir John of “speaking in the rabble- rousing tone of the witch-hunt.”

More than just a dramatisation of a scandalous event in one actor’s life, de Jongh’s epic play whose characters include the Home Secretary, the Lord Chief Justice, a public schoolboy, a pretty policeman and a lavatory attendant, suggests that the response to Gielgud’s conviction reflected the anxious political and social mood of the time. Britain had begun to follow America’s lead in regarding homosexuals as potential security risks, and judges, politicians and policemen expressed alarm at the rise in the number of cases coming before the courts. Gielgud’s conviction played a small but distinct part in the long battle to make homosexuality legal. The play captures the spirit of Britain in the early 1950s – when judges, politicians and doctors were describing homosexuality in terms of a cancer, an epidemic and a threat to national life – and offers an extraordinary insight into the dramatic changes in social attitudes to gay life in the last fifty years.