The Time Of Your Life
by William Saroyan
by William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life is a poignant exploration of the lives and dreams of various characters in a San Francisco bar during the tumultuous year of 1939 as they navigate love, loneliness, and the complexities of human existence.
About The Play
About The Play
Set in 1939 as Europe plunges into war and America remains in the throes of the great depression, Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon Bar, a seedy San Francisco waterfront honky-tonk, is a way-station welcoming lost souls of all kinds. Into Nick’s world-in-a-barroom of marble-game machines, drunks, evil vice cops, and comically bad entertainers arrives Kitty Duvall, possibly an internationally renowned Burlesque dancer or possibly a “two-dollar whore” (no one can be quite sure).
While open-hearted, open-handed Joe sets up his flunky, Tom, to woo the angelic Kitty, he also helps a would-be dancer to fulfil his lifelong dream, while we meet a lovelorn young man searching for love at the end of a telephone, a longshoreman with the soul of a poet, slumming society swells, and a boozy old coot with a past that he makes up as he goes along, muttering in the corner about the abyss the world may fall into at any moment…
A rich tapestry of human life, peopled by a profusion of wistful dreamers, pining lonely hearts, and beer-hall-philosophers, and featuring the largest cast ever assembled at the Finborough Theatre.
The first play to win both the New York Drama Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize, The Time of Your Life is a twentieth century American masterpiece.
Saroyan’s best known play, The Time of Your Life was originally produced on Broadway by the Theatre Guild in 1939 with Joe Dowling, Celeste Holm and Gene Kelly. It has been revived three times on Broadway; was filmed in 1948, starring James Cagney; and twice filmed for TV including a PBS production in 1976 with Patti LuPone and Kevin Kline. It was last seen in the UK in a star-studded Royal Shakespeare Company production in Stratford and London in 1983, with John Thaw, Daniel Massey, Zoe Wanamaker, Miles Anderson, and Henry Goodman. The Daily Mail called it “A remarkable play which blazes forth like a brave beacon: warming and full of fire”.
The Cast:
Joe – Alistair Cumming
Tom – Matthew Rowland Roberts
Kitty Duval – Maeve Malley-Ryan
Nick – Brett Findlay
Arab – Payman Jaberi
Kit Carson – Robin Dunn
McCarthy – Jack Baldwin
Krupp – John Eastman
Harry – Omar Ibrahim
Wesley – Harry Waller
Dudley – Giles Roberts
Elsie – Natalie Britton
Lorene/Ma – Anne Bird
Mar L – Emma Vane
Willie – Kevin Millington
Blick – Gwilym Lloyd
Society Gentleman – Alex Dee
Society Lady – Annie Julian
Killer – Larissa Archer
Her Sidekick – Nicola Sangster
Sailor – David Palliser
Cop/Sam – Andy Root
Newsboy – Anthony Kinahan
Another Cop – Hannah Scott
Anna – Tanya Cooke