A Poignant Portrait Of An Old World Performer

After a critically acclaimed run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, father-daughter team Katie and Ian Duncan (of Blue Peter fame), and acclaimed director Ian Talbot bring their arresting new drama to London's Park Theatre this winter. Taking the audience inside the dying art form of pantomime, Duncan stars as stage veteran Ronald Roy Humphrey, a seasoned Dame who offers up ghosts and memories of an old world populated by promenades, piers and penny arcades as he wistfully looks back at a life he'd rather forget.

Set in the green room of a Northern seaside town theatre where the performer has played his last hometown show of the day, Humphrey peels off the layers of make-up and vivid costumery to reveal a sad clown beneath the glitz, glamour and forced bravado. Aware his greatest days are long behind him, he cheerfully reminisces in happier moments which balance out whiskey-tinged flights of melancholy. Poignant and deeply moving, The Dame is a fascinating collision of past, present, magical realism, truth and the human condition.