Directed by Duncan Sykes
June 17 & 18, 1994

Programme Notes       [Programme cover]

The author, Bill MacIlwraith, was born of Scottish parents in London in 1928. After serving with the R.A.F., he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and in 1957 became a professional writer. During the sixties he wrote television drama, film scripts and a stage play, The Anniversary, which was later made into a film starring Bette Davis. In the seventies and eighties he turned his attention to television comedy, writing, among others, Two's Company starring Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden and the boxing series Seconds Out which starred Robert Lindsay. In 1990, the Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead, performed the world première of his play The Last Gamble. MacIlwraith directed London's first fully staged performance in two hundred years of Robert Howard, John Dryden and Henry Purcell's dramatic opera The Indian Queen. He is married with two children and has lived in the borough of Harrow for over thirty years.