Bully Boy / The Mortuary Sisters
(Past Show:- November 2021)
Bully Boy
by Sandi Toksvig
The Mortuary Sisters
by Jazz Ely
Gallery Players presented a ‘Double Bill’
(two contrasting one act plays in one glorious evening!)
Bully Boy by Sandi Toksvig
Patrolling the dusty streets, every step could be your last. You’re twenty years old, a soldier in the British Army, and nothing has prepared you for what you now face.
Oscar, a major confined to a wheelchair after service in the Falklands, is sent to a desert combat zone to investigate Eddie, a young squaddie from Burnley accused of throwing an eight-year-old boy down a well. His enquiry lifts the lid on Eddie’s fragile mental health, and an unlikely bond is formed between the two men. Both, we come to realise, are victims of war.
“Maybe they simply didn’t want to kill anyone. Maybe most people, even soldiers, don’t want to kill anyone.” Major Oscar Hadley, Bully Boy.
Sandi Toksvig known and loved as a comedian, author and broadcaster has written a ferociously gripping play which offers a startling insight into the minds of soldiers. She explores the damage war does to anyone who participates in it – in whatever capacity – with passion and great tenderness.
“I thought about the young men I had met who had been sent to do an incomprehensibly difficult job by their nation and who, in many instances, had not been cared for properly when they returned home, broken inside. …. I remain full of rage on behalf of the young men who have been sent to do older men’s political bidding.”
Dean Wales and Ben Maytham gave sensitive and powerful performance as Oscar and Eddie.
‘Fine, absorbing and remarkably accomplished… delves, with sensitivity, into an issue of burning relevance’ Daily Telegraph
The Mortuary Sisters by Jazz Ely
A World Premiere!
‘The customers here are a lot less demanding and opinionated than the ones in Debenhams.’
How old were you when you saw your first corpse?
For April it was eleven years old after school helping her dad out at the family business. The local morgue.
The Mortuary Sisters – a dark comedy that follows the night that two sisters are working late in the morgue.
April – determined to carry on the family business.
Polly – the carefree wild child who returns home from gallivanting around Edinburgh to help her sister break free from the world she is stuck in.
The girls reminisce about everything from smothering themselves in buttercream icing at seven-year-olds’ birthday parties to the events that led them to that night
Stones hit against the windows. One sister hears footsteps.
Will they make it through?
Jazz Ely is an alternative performance maker and writer.
The Mortuary Sisters is a dark comedy that focuses on the relationship of two sisters who’ve grown up in a morgue, making over corpses from a young age, yet who have become very different people. The play is a mixture of light and shade.
Claire Walkinshaw and Lottie Pook brought April and Polly to life as complex, dynamic and conflicted young women trying to help each other move on.
Were you among the first audience to see the World Premiere of this new play by Jazz Ely?
Past Show – November 2021
The Gallery Studio Theatre,
St George’s Street
Ipswich,
Suffolk,
IP1 3NF
