Miranda Hart writes her first play
- Miranda Hart's play, The Most Important Journey Doesn't Need A Passport, debuts next month at Ink Festival
- The short piece features alongside Oh, Hazel, Arthur Smith's tribute to his late mother
- The Most Important Journey explores marrying "sacrificial love and responsibility", says the Miranda star
Miranda Hart has written her first play.
Rehearsals for The Most Important Journey Doesn't Need A Passport begin next week, ahead of the production's performance at the Ink Festival in Halesworth in Suffolk next month.
The piece is included in a compilation of seven short plays, performed at various times each day from 21st to 24th April, which also includes Oh, Hazel by Arthur Smith, about his mother's struggle with Alzheimer's.
The Most Important Journey is about a woman and her parents waiting to board a plane, repeatedly checking that they have all their documents, irritated and frustrated by each other's company.
"My initial situation was a rather obvious one with the comedy of people always thinking they have lost their passports when they're in 'a safe place'," Hart told Great British Life magazine. "But I wanted a known backdrop so I could make it about something a little deeper.
"I'm interested in the generational difference of the therapeutic notion of self-care versus duty and sacrifice. It's very important, in the awareness of emotional well-being, that self-care is not selfish, but vital for nurturing one's own energetic resources and being your best self to develop your passions and to help others. But it's interesting to me how we marry that with sacrificial love and responsibility. It's rather a big subject and I only hint at it and hope it gets people mulling."
Starring Isabella Inchbald as Sarah and Sally-Ann Burnett and Keith Hill as her parents Jackie and Dennis, the set-up is one that fans of Hart's sitcom Miranda will recognise, director James Christopher told British Comedy Guide.
"She uses the technique that made her comedy unique, which is leaning into the audience as herself, as if the fourth wall didn't exist," the former Times and Daily Express critic-turned-playwright explains. "That was the USP of her television show and that's very much what it looks like. The first four minutes are her having a conversation with the audience about going on holiday with her parents but it's really just the odd one-liner. You can't help but obviously think, 'oh, it's Miranda in this three-hander'.
"But it then goes deeper than that, how the love for one's parents ought to go a bit further than just putting up with them, we ought to be a little more gracious. Even when they act appallingly, one still has to love them. Even though the dad is a hypochondriac and the mother is like Hyacinth Bucket, that's a quite sweet line really."
Hart portrayed Miss Hannigan in the 2017 West End production of the musical Annie and her stage acting credits include Alecky Blythe's Cruising.
However, The Most Important Journey Doesn't Need A Passport is the first play she's written, notwithstanding her one-woman sketch and character comedy shows that she took to the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 2000s. A brief extract from the play was first performed on Radio 4's Today programme in 2020.
Burnett and Hill also star in Smith's Oh, Hazel, the comedian's tribute to his late mother that serves as a companion piece to Syd, the 2018 play which Smith wrote and performed about his father, a former policeman and prisoner of war.
"It's a very personal play for Arthur," says Christopher. "It's set up like a monologue but Syd is actually in it as she reads from her diary, and it goes back through time. But what you're getting is shards of memory, where you can see what's happening to her mind. It's a very subtle, lovely piece to someone he adored who lost her grip on reality."
The two plays are part of a strand of seven performed together called The Inkredibles, which also features pieces written by actor Elliot Cowan and Will Gompertz, the former BBC arts editor, now director of arts and learning for the Barbican Centre.
Smith performs stand-up at the festival as well, alongside Mark Steel, Shaparak Khorsandi and Arabella Weir. The weekend also features KYTV and Blackadder star Helen Atkinson-Wood in conversation and Molly Naylor, writer of the 2015 Sky sitcom After Hours, reading poems from her new collection Whatever You've Got.