Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

by Roald Dahl (adapted by Richard George)

Play Introduction
About the Author
Cast & Crew
Rehearsal Photos
Performance Photos
More about Roald Dahl
Review

Introduction

Introduction of the First Show in 2006: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

The play features a magical performance from Tim Solomons as Willy Wonka, and Robert Jaye s and Linda Lewis are the show’s narrators. Society chairman John Colmans is the main grandparent, Grandpa Joe Bucket. He is joined by senior GST members Sonia Woolf, Joyce Piper and Simon Ramsey in other grandparental roles, and you can look forward to a lot of fun with them. The Oompa - Loompas are mainly children, with a few familiar GST faces, and the kids who win the Golden Tickets
are Lily Grant and Marc Jone s who were both great in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and new stars Zoe Hazan and Gabriel Toumazis. Charlie Bucket is played by newcomer Johannes Donald.

The GST has been in touch, through his mother, with Freddie Highmore, the local Garden Suburb boy who appeared as Charlie Bucket in the 2005 Johnny Depp film. Both he and our own Johannes were taught by Andrew Craze (Mr. Salt). Two Charlies from NW11 – now what an achievement that is!

About the author

My candle burns at both ends,

It will not last the night ,

But ah my foes and oh my friends,

It gives a lovely light. Roald Dahl’s motto

From the publication of James and The Giant Peach and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory in the 1960s to his death in 1990, Roald Dahl became the most successful children’s author in the world.. His creations endure - through Hollywood movies, theatre adaptations and musical works, but still most potently of all through the pure magic of his writing upon the page.

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents – the child of a second marriage. His father and elder sister died when Roald was just three. His mother was left to raise two stepchildren and her own four children. Roald was her only son.

He only liked sports while at school and was said by his English master at Repton to be “quite incapable of marshalling his thoughts on paper”. There was one advantage to going to Repton, however – the school was close to Cadbury’s and the company regularly involved the schoolboys in testing new varieties of chocolate bars.

Dahl’s unhappy time at school was to influence his writing greatly. He once said that what distinguished him from most other children’s writers was “this business of remembering what it was like to be young”. Roald’s childhood and schooldays are the subject of his autobiography Boy.

At 18, Roald joined an expedition to Newfoundland , and then started work for Shell as a salesman in Dar es Salaam .. Although he was 6ft 6in, he was accepted as a pilot officer in the war and flew Gladiator fighters against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. His wartime exploits include having a luger pointed at his head by the leader of a German convoy, crash-landing in no-man’s land (and sustaining injuries that entailed having his nose reshaped!) and even surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens.

In 1942, he went to Washington as an air attaché. His writing career began in earnest following a meeting with C S Forrester, author of Captain Hornblower. Forrester was so impressed with Dahl’s writing that he immediately found a magazine editor to take it for publication. Roald Dahl’s first novel for children was not, as many suppose, James and the Giant Peach but The Gremlins.. Dahl went on to write several film scripts, including the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He disliked many of the film adaptat ions of his own work which appeared in his lifetime.

Dahl and his family moved back to England in 1960 and settled in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire at Gipsy House. It was here, in a small hut at the bottom of the garden, that he would write most of his unforgettable books. By all accounts, the hut was a dingy little place but one that Roald viewed as a cosy refuge.

Roald’s career had to take second place when his family suffered several tragedies. His oldest daughter Olivia died and his three-month-old son Theo was brain-damaged after a road accident, though he did make a remarkable recovery. The Hollywood film star Patricia Neal, Roald’s first wife, suffered three massive strokes but, with Roald’s help and encouragement, she too recovered sufficiently to resume her acting career.

Both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were published in the USA several years before appearing in the UK in 1967. Charlie book went on to achieve phenomenal success all over the world. The Chinese edition was the biggest printing of any book ever – two million copies!

An unbroken string of bestselling titles followed, including The BFG, Danny The Champion of the World, The Twits, The Witches, Boy and Going Solo. Sales of Matilda, Roald’s penultimate book, broke all previous records for a work of children’s fiction with UK sales of over half a million paperbacks in six months. Roald Dahl died in 1990 at the age of 74..

Since Roald Dahl’s death, his books have more than maintained their popularity. Total sales of the UK editions are around 37 million, with more than 1 million copies sold every year! In a World Book Day 1999 survey amongst 15,000 7-11 year-olds, 4 of his books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were in the top ten.

Movies of James and the Giant Peach and Matilda have been much more successful, commercially and artistically, than the earlier adaptations a new version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was released in 2005., starring Johnny Depp and featuring, as Charlie Bucket, Freddie Highmore who was a pupil at Brookland School in NW11.

In 2005 the Roald Dahl Museum was opened in Great Missenden.

Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, 81-83 High Street, Great Missenden, HP16 0AL, Buckinghamshire, England . (T: 01494 892192 Open: 10.00-17.00 Tues-Sun and Bank Holiday Mondays, Closed: Christmas Day and Boxing Day) . If you enjoy tonight’s show and the film, you may find it worthwhile taking the trip there.

Cast & Crew

THE CAST

PRODUCTION TEAM

The set was constructed by members of the Garden Suburb Theatre and members of the cast’s families.

Rehearsal Photos

Performance Photos

Roald Dahl

Review

GST is affiliated to the National Dramatic and Operatic Association