ARCHIVE: While We’re Here

Written by Barney Norris
Directed by Alice Hamilton

Carol Tessa Peake-Jones
Eddie Andrew French

Audiences loved Barney Norris’s Eventide when it played in our Brewery Theatre in November 2015. We’re now thrilled to present his moving new play and welcome acclaimed touring theatre company Up In Arms back to Bristol.

Eddie and Carol were lovers once, but their lives went in different directions. Now they meet again on a park bench in a town full of
memories, and find something still burns between them.

On the country’s southern margin where the towns give way to
the English Channel, both search for the centre of their lives. Will
they find a way to let go of the past for the sake of their futures?

Alice Hamilton’s productions of Barney Norris’s plays Visitors and
Eventide for Up In Arms have been described as “heartbreaking” by
the New York Times. Here she works again with the Critics Circle
and Off West End Award-winning playwright and novelist and
we’re sure the results will once again be rather special.

Tessa Peake-Jones plays Carol. She is most well-known for playing Raquel in the television series Only Fools and Horses and currently stars as Mrs Maguire in ITV’s Grantchester. Tessa has had a long and varied career including: Unforgotten (ITV), Marchlands (ITV), Doctor Who (BBC) and Legacy (BBC). Her recent stage credits include: Beacons (Park Theatre), Home (Arcola), Brimstone and Treacle (Arcola), The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder (National Theatre), The Park (Pit Theatre/RSC), Hamlet, A Comedy of Errors (RSC).

Andrew French plays Eddie. His other stage credits include: This Flesh of Mine/When Nobody Returns (Border Crossings), The Iphegenia Quartet (The Gate), Bully Boy (Mercury Theatre Colchester), Boi Boi Is Dead (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Roundabout Season (Paines Plough), Refugee Boy (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Julius Caesar (RSC), Six Characters In Search Of An Author (Aquila Theatre Usa), Measure For Measure (Almeida Theatre), Monster (Royal Exchange Manchester), As You Like It (Wyndhams Theatre London), Reference To Salvador Dali…(Arcola/Young Vic London),The Taming Of The Shrew (Nottingham Playhouse), Merchant Of Venice (Royal National Theatre), Troilus And Cressida (Royal National Theatre), The Merchant Of Venice (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), Things Fall Apart (West Yorkshire/Royal Court Theatre), The Tempest (Nottingham Playhouse Theatre), The Tempest (Shared Experience).