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Night Must Fall
by Emly Williams
Opening Night 23 September 1999
Director: Don Evans
Night Must Fall is widely regarded as the forerunner of a number of stage and screen plays featuring psychopaths. I suppose you could describe Dan, played originally in London by the author himself, as Hannibal Lecter in a bell-boy's pillbox hat. A review of the play in 1935 was headlined "A study is scizophrenia." Later Williams confessed that he had to look up 'schizophrenia' in the dictionary.

Whatever emotional disability afflicts Dan, he is a complex character and his beaviour is the catalyst for what London Times in 1935 described as "a study of vanity, the vanity of the bore, the vanity of old age, the crazy histrionic vanity of the criminal." In the late 1990s Night Must Fall betrays a certain quaintness and tendency toward the "spine-chilling melodrama referred to by an American newspaper in 1936, but it is still a well made play, and is of the accessible kind.
Cast
Mrs Bramson Margaret Laube
Olivia Grayne Vivienne Aitken
Hubert Laurie Stuart Mathieson
Nurse Libby Deborah Manning
Mrs Terence Beth Stephens
Dora Parkoe Justine Pierre
Inspector Belsize Michael Andrewes
Dan Gregor Henderson
Crew
Set design & construction Jon Waite
Wardrobe and set dressing Charlotte Handley
Stage manager/script assistant Natalie Milne
Light design/tech operation Ian Leslie
  Toby Heal
  Corey Anderson
Properties Justine Pierre
  Natalie Milne
  Deborah Manning
Publicity Eddie Cleverley
  Beth Rask
  Stuart Mathieson
Sponsorship Beth Rask
  Lyndon Hood
Poster Design Simon Pickard
Wardrobe assistant Jan Stroud
Production Assistant Miriam Rask
Programme Lyndon Hood