After Henry
Simon Brett & Chris Summerfield
Genre: Comedic Drama
Cast size: 8
Duration: Full Length
Simon Brett & Chris Summerfield | Musical | Full-length | Principals: 3m, 4f Support: 1m/f
Short synopsis
- Synopsis
- Characters
- Music Player
This 'chamber' musical is based on Simon Brett’s radio and two times BAFTA Award nominee television series, ‘After Henry’. It's easy to stage with a small cast and can be performed either with an orchestra or just a keyboard. The casting requirements involve three elderly actors who provide the majority of the comedy. Add to this the often strained relationship between a mother, her mother, and her daughter who are unashamedly middle of the middle class.
Sarah France’s doctor husband Henry was killed in a car crash when she was in her early forties, a couple of years before the action begins. Her attempts to deal with widowhood are not helped by the nosiness and demands of her mother Eleanor, who lives in the basement flat in the house, or the emotional traumas and moodiness of her nineteen-year-old daughter Clare, who’s got the top-floor flat.
Sarah is kept sane by the work she does helping in a bookshop run by her gay friend Russell. He acts as both a sounding-board and emotional support for her.
The story of the musical involves potential romances for all three women. Clare is being messed around by a boy called Greg, but she hasn’t got the confidence to tell him to get lost. Eleanor and her much-patronised friend Vera Poling (who is rich and lives in a care home called The Sycamores) are meanwhile both competitively interested in a charming elderly man called Vernon (who may not turn out to be all that he seems). And even Sarah’s loneliness is offered a lifeline in the handsome shape of a widower called Chris Wellington.
Is it long enough after Henry for her to allow a new man into her life? All of these emotional complications are untangled in this bittersweet inter-generational family musical.
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