Valerie Clarke - Director
Also featuring:
Alison Marshall; Matthew Newman; Ann Sykes; Graeme Gibaut; Brian Beeston; Tag; Malcom Bentote
Time: The present
About the play
Jean McConnell has written five twist-in-the-tail playlets for women - all set on a promenade - that are by turns, funny and poignant.
In Shoppers two well-to-do shopaholics have a rather surprising secret.
Early Blight is a heart breaking exploration of a doomed mother/daughter relationship.
Dancers wittily dissects the tea-dancing world of two skittish women.
Late Frost is a drama in which a woman finds out something she would rather not have known.
And Doggies is a hilarious tale about two very different types of dog-owner - one with a Pekinese and the other with a mongrel.
The plays are drawn together by the Players with a love story and some other dog owners!
About the author
As well as her many plays, Jean McConnell has written for film, television, radio and numerous fiction stories for women's magazines. An actor herself, Jean directs her own work at her local amateur dramatic society in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where she lives.
When a production of Deckchairs 1 was produced in Perth in August 2005, a local journalist from the newspaper Post Impressions, telephoned Jean McConnell from Australia to interview her for an article. Jean told the journalist that she started writing her series of 'Deckchairs' plays for two women, for two actor friends who asked her to write a play that would give them a range of characters to act. Perhaps the reason why they are so popular is that Jean said that they were based on true stories that she had heard or experienced. Also she revealed that her favourite playlet from Deckchairs 1 was Doggies.
Jean's volumes of Deckchairs - she is up to Deckchairs 4 now - have been amongst her most famous works, being performed all over the world by both professionals and amateurs.
