By Patrick Hamilton
Adapted for the Stage by Fedelis Morgan

The Finborough Theatre

July/August 2008

Director: Gemma Fairlie, Set Design: Alex Marker, Lighting Design: Trevor Wallace, Costume Design: Penn O'Gara, Sound Design: Steve Mayo,

Cast
Clare Calbraith, Jamie de Courcey, Anthony Eden, Caroline Faber, Mathew Flynn, Jonathan Kemp, Gyuri Sarossy.

Press

**** Four stars The Times
**** Four stars The Evening Standard
**** Four stars Time Out (Critics Choice)
**** Four stars What's On Stage
**** Four stars The Financial Times

'Alex Marker's ingenious design suggests a wealth of locations including the streets of Earl's Court, squalid bedsits, noisy pubs, and showbiz Brighton. Better yet, he comes up with not one but two visual coups in the final moments.'
Charles Spencer - The Daily Telegraph

'Hamilton's 1941 novel is set in the streets around the Finborough, and Alex Marker's clever design plays upon this, while creating a suffocating world where Hamilton's unlovely desperados race towards catastrophe in an alcoholic haze.'
Lyn Gardener - The Guardian

'Alex Marker's atmospheric stage setting, with its fragment of stuccoed, pillared Earl's Court, springs two fine surprises and summons up the dingy and glamorous locations where Bone vainly courts Netta.'
Nicholas de Jongh - The Evening Standard.

'As so often here, the evening is almost made before an actor appears, thanks to the wonderful Alex Marker. He perfectly takes us back to the shabby grandeur of the period with an all-encompassing design featuring antique streetlamp, pub and street signs, architectural leftovers and some Man Ray-style photos.'
Philip Fisher - The British Theatre Guide

'Thankfully Alex Marker's gorgeously dilapidated period set and Gemma Fairlie's imaginative, sure-handed direction sees the play brought vibrantly to life, from the local boozers and run-down hotels to boisterous double acts and inner demons.'
Evelyn Curlet - The Stage

'Some stylish staging from Alex Marker combined with excellent direction and use of space from Gemma Fairlie combine to ensure that from the moment you enter the Finborough theatre this month, Hangover Square ensnares you in its grasp.'
Kate Jackson - What's On Stage

'Well-cast actors with an unusually good feel for the period and a moody set design from Alex Marker make for an enthralling evening at the theatre.'

'When, at the play's end, a curtain at the back of the stage swishes open to reveal a real window, showing the sweeping curve of an Earls Court street, still grand, still a little faded, it is a wonderfully apt moment.'
Claire Ingrams - Rogues and Vagabonds

"One of the great books of the twentieth century" The Independent on Sunday

Set in darkest Earls Court just before the outbreak of the Second World War and written by local author Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square is at last performed in its natural home - at Earls Court's Finborough Theatre.

A classic story of loneliness, obsession and addiction in pre-war Earls Court, set against an atmospheric film noir backdrop. Alcoholic George Harvey Bone is hopelessly infatuated with a young actress, Netta, who is cool, hopelessly desirable and utterly contemptuous of him. As Bone faces "the end of hope and love" as he falls under Netta's spell, he is cast adrift in an unsettling, seductive, darkly comic world of seedy saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers - except in his "dead" moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without doubt, that he must kill her....