Stags & Hens

Stags & Hens was originally conceived as an in-house television film for students of television and drama at Manchester Polytechnic where, in 1977 /78 Willy Russell held the Chair in Creative Writing. For various reasons this project never came to fruition. The possibility of Stags & Hens becoming a film was not, however, abandoned altogether and in 1990 Willy and Mike Ockrent joined forces once again, Willy writing the screenplay ( along with a substantial part of the soundtrack) and Mike directing what became the film Dancin’ Thru The Dark.

The action of the play takes place in the Ladies and Gents toilets of a Liverpool club where Dave and Linda have decided, unbeknownst to each other, to hold their respective stag and hen parties.

“Uniquely for a play of mine, Stags & Hens began with the idea for its setting. I was aware of existing plays set in club-land – in bars and on dance-floors – but none that had ever dared to locate its action in the ladies and gents toilets… this club/dancehall-toilets idea also had built-in theatrical credibility; having the action take place not on the dance-floor or the bars or the corridors but in the toilets meant that at a stroke I’d solved one of the crucial questions in the making of any play, ie, how to convincingly bring the action before the eye of the audience. And in this play, where better or more natural to locate the action than in these toilets where I knew from my own attempts at a mis-spent youth, that on nights such as this, all the really crucial stuff, the juicy stuff, the scandal, the plotting, the dreams and hopes and defeats and failures and fights – all of this got aired not out there on the dance-floor but, respectively, in the ladies and the gents.”

Dancin’ Thru’ The Dark - Film

Original Production

Liverpool Everyman, 1978

Director - Chris Bond

Designer - Billy Meal

Cast

Linda - Anne-louise Wakefield

Maureen - Barbara Peirson

Bernadette - Cecily Hobbs

Carol - Donna Champion

Frances - Lola Young

Robbie - Phillip Donaghy

Billy - Christopher Martin

Kav - Chris Darwin

Eddy - Edward Clayton

Peter - Richard Clay Jones

‘…a bleakly funny and perceptive study of working-class misogyny, puritanism and waste’

Guardian

Combines comedy with acrid truth in the style Willy Russell has made unmistakably his own… and hits off brilliantly the herd instinct driving both sexes onward and bedward’

Daily Telegraph

Liverpool Playhouse, 1982

Director - Pip Broughton

Designer - Ellen Cairns

Cast

Billy - Andrew Schofield

Robbie - Nick Maloney

Kav - Brian Regan

Peter - Daniel Webb

Eddy - Gareth Williams

Dave - Steven Mathers/Peter Wild

Maureen - Mia Soteriou

Bernadette - Noreen Kershaw

Carol - Judy Holt

Frances - Kate Fitzgerald

Linda - Angela Walsh

Willy Russell's Stags and Hens is a magnificently vulgar assault on the threadbare idyll of young love and marriage. An engaged couple unwittingly roll up at the same seedy club for their stag/hen parties. Russell is accurate and affectionate, with occasional wonderfully surrealistic flights of fancy, improbably triggered off by tedious surburban paraphernalia like the accoutrements the couple is supposed to need for the simple business of coffee-making.

He's also strikingly visual: the tatty toilets, the girls in their glad-rags - Frances stretched out on the toilet floor to fasten her canary yellow pedal pushers over her bulging paunch; Bernadette in a scarlet sequin boob-tube stopping the gaping ladders in her black stockings with nail varnish, and the men carrying in the wholy-faced, unconscious groom to be, traces of an unfortunate chicken curry dinner all over his trousers. The final orgiastic tableau on the stairs is gorgeous.

Guardian

The Young Vic, London. 1984

Director - David Thacker

Designer - Shelagh Keegan

Cast

Noreen Kershaw

Kate Fitzgerald

Anne Miles

Eithne Browne

Gilly Coman

Peter Christian

Ray Kingsley

Nick Maloney

Graham Fellows

Andrew Secombe

Matthew Marsh

30 years after Stags & Hens had first opened at the Liverpool Everyman, Bob Eaton approached Willy to stage a new production at the Liverpool Royal Court theatre.

Stags and Hens has had a varied past. This version, Stags and Hens – The Remix tells exactly the same story as earlier versions which, variously, have been an aborted student film, a stage play, and a feature film, Dancin Thru The Dark. In borrowing from contemporary music culture and calling this version The Remix I wanted to acknowledge that although the emphasis may have been shifted and the tempo altered it was not in an attempt to replace the original but to look at the original afresh. Although retaining the original 1977 setting I wanted the play to move at a kind of pace more in keeping with the theatrical tempo today, a tempo which has increased significantly in the thirty years since the play was first seen.