DEATH IN LEICESTER
by Roy Minton
Directed by John Boud
Cast:
Michael HaInes, Don Starkey
THE AUTHOR
Questopics, June 1967
"The author, Roy Minton, has had a fascinating career. Born in a mining village near Nottingham, the eldest of 13 children, he left home at the age of 15 to do a variety of jobs—coal miner, clerk, stoker on an ocean-going tug, labourer, statistician. Trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he has done the usual round of repertory, radio and television.
"Roy Minton has now settled for being a full time writer and last year was awarded the first B.B.C. Bursary for playwriting. He is now working on a play commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. He is a writer who writes for actors, with sensitivity and realism which results of course from his training in the theatre."
Guardian Obituary,
August 2024
"The writer Roy Minton, who has died aged 90, was every bit as radical and uncompromising a television talent as Alan Clarke, the director with whom he forged a long-time partnership. Most famously, they made the banned 1977 television play Scum, brutal in its account of violence inside a borstal – as exercised by both inmates and warders.
THE PLAY
Questopics, June 1967
"It is both a wildly funny and a tragic play. The title comes from both characters having worked in soft furnishings in Leicester—'DEATH IN LEICESTER' was their separate unhappily married lives there that led to escape together to comparative tranquility in London. The play deals with their success and failure, their hopes and fears.
PRODUCTION PHOTOS
PRESS RESPONSE
Roy Minton's two-character drama divided opinion more sharply than the other plays in the Festival. Amateur Stage admired the author's courage in sustaining a lengthy duologue with minimal action and praised the authentic dialogue and underlying pathos, although it felt the deliberately static middle act tested the audience's patience. Douglas McVay also responded sympathetically to its blend of sadness and humour. By contrast, The Stage dismissed the play as verbose, contrived and relentlessly dull. Together the reviews suggest a work whose quiet realism and character study appealed to some critics while leaving others wholly unconvinced.
Amateur Stage
The Middlesex County Times
The Stage
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
DEATH IN LEICESTER