Stage: Driving the message home: Siân Phillips & Derek Griffiths star in Driving Miss Daisy

With the ease of watching films, not only at the cinema but online at one of the many new media platforms, it is no wonder that for many people their knowledge of a play is not through live theatre but from one of the many screen adaptations that so often follow on from critical stage acclaim. The instances are too many to name but amongst them has to be Driving Miss Daisy. Pulitzer Prize, Academy and Tony Award winning playwright Alfred Uhry’s brilliant comedy drama hit the screen in a production which was the winner of four Academy Awards including Best Picture and starred Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman and Dan Aykroyd, a great film too but nowhere near as precise as the stage version of this moving and thought provoking story. Marking 30 years since the play first premiered, a new production comes to the Theatre Royal Brighton this September.

Starring Dame Siân Phillips as Daisy and Derek Griffiths as Hoke and directed by Richard Beecham, this is the story of an elderly widow Daisy Werthan who crashes her car one day in 1948. Her son hires her a chauffeur, an African-American named Hoke Colburn. Daisy and Hoke’s relationship gets off to a rocky start, but as times change across a 25 year backdrop of prejudice, inequality and civil unrest, a profound and life altering friendship blossoms.

Live theatre is an entirely different experience to the cinema

Dame Siân Phillips has enjoyed a dazzling career which spans more than seven decades. From her multi-award winning performance in I, Claudius to the epic film Dune, from a Tony nominated performance of Marlene on Broadway to Cabaret in the West End.

RSC actor and legendary presenter, Derek Griffiths’ numerous West End credits include the original production of Beauty and the Beast in which he originated the role of Lumière and the Child Catcher in the West End run of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the London Palladium.

Live theatre is an entirely different experience to cinema, one that demands the full attention of the audience and when that works it is the most exciting of entertainment experiences. And with the recent civil unrest in the USA and the emergence once again of a racist far right community, the lessons to be learnt from Uhry’s impressive drama are ones that sadly need to be reaffirmed. This opportunity to see such an important work of theatre with such an impressive cast is one that simply is not to be missed.

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