Author Archive: sam@design-monkeys.co.uk

Hi! My name’s Sam and I’m portraying the role of Jack in this upcoming production of Incorruptible. My most recent role here at Millgate was Branwell last summer in “We Are Three Sisters”, and you might also have seen me in Great Expectations and The Graduate. It was with great excitement that I agreed to don the motley and an eyepatch for this play and make a fool of myself again! Jack’s a fascinating and […]

Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain in 1955 at the age of 28. Amanda Whittington’s story gives the audience a glimpse into Ellis’s life leading up to her being convicted of killing her lover David Blakely and the injustices surrounding her trial and execution. As the Director Sue Stephenson states in her notes in the programme, there would have been a very different outcome had the crime had been committed […]

In 1955, Ruth Ellis shot and killed her abusive lover in cold blood. Convicted of the crime at trial, Ruth became the last woman to the hanged for murder in Britain. But what drove Ruth to kill David, her racing driver lover? Why did she plead not guilty to the murder at trial? Who was she trying to protect? Set in the seedy world of 1950s gentlemen’s clubs, The Thrill of Love by Amanda Whittington […]

I play Vickie Martin (formerly Valerie Mewes) in the play, who was a real-life model and actress and close friend of Ruth Ellis. She is an ambitious girl and mixed with some very affluent and influential people but her own story turns out tragically too! She cares deeply for her friend and tries (like others) to save her from the destructive relationships she has become embroiled in! Sadly, as we know, with no success! The […]

19:15PM. Tuesday. February 5th 2019. Night three of Playhouse Creatures. I’m currently sat on my little perch in the Millgate tech box, excited for another run of a great, gritty little show called Playhouse Creatures. I expect that the cast are just about ready, the audience are sipping their last pre-show drinks and, I hope, my sound operator colleague Emma Sykes is arriving at the theatre! Playhouse is a show I’ve dabbled in before, doing […]

This play is a thoughtful and sympathetic exploration of a little-explored subject: the lives and careers of the first female performers to appear on the London stage. It is set in the Restoration period of the seventeenth century and focuses on five women – real historical characters – and their theatrical fortunes in the bawdy, licentious times that followed the overturned Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell. The play has an all-female cast. Men only materialise […]