Greenwich Playhouse Presents A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE Until Jan 16

At the close of its twentieth year of presenting internationally acclaimed theatre, Galleon Theatre Company is delighted to announce that it will next stage Oscar Wilde's hilarious satire - A Woman of No Importance.

Galleon's production of A Woman of No Importance transposes Wilde's comedy drama to a Christmas party at the end of the 1950s. The seamless and careful repositioning of the play from 1893 to the end of the 1950s liberates Wilde's heartrending play from melodramatic Victorian trappings and brings it to an age closer to our own. Whereas, Bruce Jamieson's sensitive realignment of Wilde's text heightens contemporary audience empathy with the characters, their predicaments and delivers a thought provoking and highly enjoyable seasonal theatrical treat.

In A Woman of No Importance Wilde exposes, through piercing wit, the hypocrisy of a society which scorns and punishes a woman for her sexual misdemeanours but applauds and grants honours to the man in question. The play centres on the then publically damning revelation of Mrs. Arbuthnot's long-concealed secret - she conceived a child out of wedlock.

By setting the production in late 1950s, Galleon positions Wilde's plot and characters within a specific British socio-political context and in the last decade when it was still unacceptable for children to be born outside of marriage. By 1959, fourteen years after men returned from War to reclaim traditional roles in the work place and within the family, women had reverted to domesticity; and Victorian morality together with its gender expectations had once again been re-affirmed as the desired norm. Suddenly, a woman with a past like Mrs. Arbuthnot would have found herself socially stigmatised. The 1950s was a decade largely characterised by America's muscular assertion of its political, cultural, economic, and militarily Super Power status; by the advent of the consumer age; and by the emergence of a distinctive and rebellious youth culture, expressed in particular through fashion and music. In this context, Hester, the young idealistic, American woman of Wilde's play, symbolises the impending infiltration of American values and the dawn of the 1960s which was to revolutionise society forever.

A Woman of No Importance follows Galleon's sell out, 2009 production of The Importance of Being Earnest which garnered great critical acclaim and broke fifteen years of box office records at its home - the Greenwich Playhouse.

The Director - BRUCE JAMIESON - is a co-founding member of the Greenwich Playhouse, Galleon Theatre Company and Galleon Films. He has directed nearly thirty previous Galleon productions and played leading roles in some sixty stage plays. As an actor, his television and film credits include The Oxford Murders (Tornasol); Murphy's Law (Tiger Aspect); Monarch of the Glen (Ecosse); Ali G-Inda House (Universal); Roughnecks (BBC); In Suspicious Circumstances (Granada); Crime Solver (BBC); and Spongebob (BBC).

The Producer - ALICE DE SOUSA - is multi-award winning writer, producer and actress. She has created over seventy stage productions; played leading roles in some thirty theatre plays; written many highly acclaimed stage and screen scripts; won in 2009 two awards including the Portuguese government's ‘Premio de Talento' in recognition of her 25 year career. In 2005 the American Biographical Institute awarded her with ‘Great Women of the 21st Century' and ‘Woman of the Year 2005'. (These awards exclusively recognise the impact on society of the work of 1000 prolific women worldwide).

The talented Cast, with hundreds of professional theatre credits, are NATALIE BARKER (Miss Stutfield); HUGH DARBYSHIRE (Gerald); JASON DENYER (Kelvil); DARRIE GARDNER (Lady Caroline); HUGH HEMMINGS (Sir John); OLIVIA HILL (Mrs. Allonby); Mary Lincoln (Mrs. Arbuthnot); KEVIN MARCHANT (Lord Illingworth); KATH PERRY (Lady Hunstanton); LOUISE TYLER (Hester).

For more information, visit www.galleontheatre.co.uk.

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