A Noel Coward play which highlights the lighter side of old age will get Gorleston Theatre Company off to a strong start in 2017. Waiting in the Wings, set in a Thames Valley home for retired actresses will see some of the group’s most experienced performers teaming up at Gorleston Pavilion from January 19 – 21.

Coward’s famous plays including Private Lives, Hay Fever and Blithe Sprit are regularly revived in the UK and all over the world but he also wrote many others including this one in his own later life in 1960. The Wings is a residential home especially for former leading ladies who have fallen on hard times.

Coward himself said he wrote it with loving care and felt it contained some of the best scenes he’d ever written.

“I consider that the play as a whole contains, beneath the froth of its lighter moments, the basic truth that old age needn’t be nearly so dreary and sad as it is supposed to be, provided you greet it with humour and live it with courage.”

The production has an unusually large cast and will unite several long standing members of GTC, some of whom were members of the original Shrublands Youth and Adult Drama Group including Bridget Robinson, Dusty Miller, Terry Wing, Jeannie Kinkaid, Jane Harris and John Woods.

A spring musical is also planned for 2017 in a busy year for the group. Tickets for Waiting in the Wings are on sale now from the Pavilion box office.