Anne Reid and James Bolam are to star as unlikely anti-fracking campaigners in a new stage play by the political satirist Alistair Beaton.
Fracked! Or: Please Don’t Use the F-Word was announced on Thursday as part of the final season at Chichester Festival theatre under the leadership of Jonathan Church and Alan Finch.
Reid will play a normally law-abiding retired academic who becomes fanatical in her opposition to plans to drill for shale gas in a pretty English village, while Bolam will play her somewhat reluctant husband.
Beaton said he had spent a long time researching fracking, talking to people on both sides of the debate. “The more I found out about it the more potentially horrific it struck me as,” he said. “It is becoming an issue that cuts across the traditional lines of class, politics and age. That’s quite rare, it is not a left-right thing: you will find Guardian readers as upset as Telegraph readers. It is very interesting how it has broken across all the boundaries.”
Beaton clearly has taken a side, although he stressed the play itself would not be propaganda. He said it would explore the debate and hopefully audiences would have a good a time. “You can laugh,” he said. “Even fracking can be funny.”
Reid and Bolam, both 80, are familiar TV faces. The former has acted in popular programmes such as Last Tango in Halifax and Dinnerladies; the latter in The Likely Lads and New Tricks. The play will be directed by Richard Wilson, who played Victor Meldrew in One Foot In the Grave.
Beaton is known for his TV satires such as The Trial of Tony Blair in 2007 and A Very Social Secretary in 2005. His plays include Feelgood, a 2001 satire on New Labour spin doctors, and Caledonia, about Scottish banking.
Chichester has enjoyed particular good fortune in recent years with its musicals, including the West End success of Gypsy and Guys and Dolls. Two are planned in 2016 including a new stage version of the 1963 Tommy Steele musical Half a Sixpence, which will have a book by Downton Abbey’s Julian Fellowes and be directed by Rachel Kavanaugh. The other is new musical Travels With My Aunt, based on Graham Greene’s novel.
Other plays planned this year include Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with Hugh Bonneville; Joseph Fiennes playing Lawrence of Arabia in Terence Rattigan’s Ross; and the actor Bertie Carvel making his directorial debut with a revival of John Galsworthy’s Strife.
Artistic director Church is Sydney-bound after more than 10 hugely successful years in charge. Daniel Evans is moving from Sheffield to succeed him in the summer.
