User:Sayerslle/The Maitlands

The Maitlands is a 193? play by Ronald Mackenzie - finished just before his death, in a car crash.Set in the seaside house of a family who have lost their money during the Depression, it reveals with humour and pathos all their hopes, fears and aspirations as carnival day draws near.

It portrays 'the anxieties of a large middle-class group' and was first produced in July 1934, Wyndham's Theatre .??Criterion Theatre??

Mackenzie wanted Theodore Komisarjevsky to direct the play. Komisarjevsky sent a script to John Gielgud (Mackenzie and Gielgud had been schoolboys together at Hillside, a preparatory school in Godalming, and Gielgud had been provided with a long run in the West End 1 April -31 December 1932 in Mackenzies earlier play Musical Chairs) - and Gielgud liked the script but was uncertain whether to play the schoolmaster or his actor brother. - Komisarjevsky wanted him to play the schoolmaster and it was a less glamorous role for Gielgud than the ones with which the play-going public at the time associated him. The press was fairly respecful at the time but most critics thought it inferior to Mackenzie's play Musical Chairs

A TV version was produced in 1993 by the BBC, for its Performance series of plays, with a cast that included Bill Nighy, Emma Fielding, Amanda Drew, Edward Fox, Jennifer Ehle and Eileen Atkins.

1995 - the Orange Tree Theatre's artistic director, Sam Walters, revived The Maitlands, which treated the anxieties of a large middle-class group in a surprisingly generous, detailed way.

from a bill nighy website - Bill Nighy appeared in "a TV presentation of Ronald Mackenzie's popular play The Maitlands, set in the 1930s and concerning a well-to-do family fallen on hard times in a seaside town. Nighy, in the role originally played onstage by John Gielgud, would play Roger Maitland, a private school teacher with an expensive wife who dumps him while on holiday in Europe and returns just as he's falling for a friend of his cousin."