Arthur Wicksteed  Alan Frost

Muriel Wicksteed  Jocelyn Pearce

Dennis Wicksteed  Justin Clinch

Constance Wicksteed Alison Rogers

Mrs Swabb  Vikki Gomm

Canon Throbbing  Richard Worrall

Lady Rumpers  Pearl Chubb

Felicity Rumpers  Amy Millns

Mr Shanks  Steve Rockell

Sir Percy Shorter  Mat Aspden

Ms Purdue   Mellisa Thompson

HABEAS CORPUS APR 20011

Brief introduction to the play:

 

Habeas Corpus was first performed at the Lyric Theatre in London on 10 May 1973, with Alec Guinness and Margaret Courtenay in the lead roles. Bennett's first play, written in 1973, it is a comedy set in Brighton in the 1960s where the lust and longing of the permissive society has well and truly taken hold of the apparently respectable Wicksteed family.

 

The aging Dr. Arthur Wicksteed pursues his nubile patient, Felicity Rumpers. Wicksteed's wife Muriel lusts after the charming head of the BMA, Sir Percy Shorter. Shorter as well as being Wicksteed's old rival, turns out to be Felicity's father - the result of an under-the-table liaison during an air-raid with Lady Rumpers, her mother. Meanwhile, Wicksteed's spinster-sister Connie, ashamed of her flat-chestedness, has schemes of her own. Like some saucy Magill seaside postcard as retouched by Magritte, or an end-of-the-pier romp reorganised by Orton, the piece shows how a collection of stock types from Hove find themselves propelled into the permissive society with the arrival of a false-breast fitter from Leatherhead. Identities are mistaken, the wrong knockers admiringly fondled, and libidos burst out of enforced hibernation