Cooking With Elvis' & 'Bollocks'

Description

Two comic plays by Lee Hall which have had success at the Edinburgh Festival and are coming to London in February 2000 Cooking with Elvis is a domestic play that is both farcical and upsetting. Mam and Jill live together in an uneasy calm. Jill is overweight and a fiendish cook who whips up one exotic dish after another. Her father (and Mam's husband) is stuck in a wheel chair as the result of a stroke. He can neither speak nor move, but he can hear. He was a famous Elvis impersonator and from time to time steps out of the wheel chair in a series of fantasy scenes to give stirring renditions of some of Elvis's most famous hits. But Mam brings into the house a new young lover whose presence in the house become the source for hilarity and big time trouble. The ending is a deadly one, you can be sure. The play has been compared to the early black farces of Joe Orton. Also included in this volume is Bollocks!, Lee Hall's contemporary version of the Expressionist German playwright Ernst Toller's Hinkemann, which has been updated from twenties Bavaria to contemporary Tyneside.

Lee Hall has won numerous awards, including a Sony award for his phenomenally popular radio play Spoonface Steinberg, which later transferred to the stage in a production with Kathryn Hunter. His play Cooking With Elvis had a sell-out run at the Whitehall Theatre throughout 2000, after his stint as Writer in Residence at the RSC. His adaptation of A Servant to Two Masters was a smash hit for the RSC and the Young Vic, and continues to tour worldwide. His two Brecht adaptations, Mr Puntilla and his Man Matti and Mother Courage and her Children were both sell-out successes in the West End. Lee Hall was Oscar nominated for his screenplay Billy Elliot.

Cooking With Elvis: 'That subjects of such sensitivity can be made even vaguely funny is a considerable achievement.' * Mark Fisher, Guardian, 18.7.09 * 'Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall is one of Britain's most mercurial dramatists. He shifts between art forms...as quickly as he breaks from one genre...to another... Hall's ability to combine the sociopolitical with popular entertainment is well established.' * Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 19.7.09 *