As we have reported in our News section Gary has returned to the theatre stage for a very short time to be part of 'Pignight' ... a very dark comedy written by his musical writing partner and friend Snoo Wilson. It's a very small production that hopes to get the play some wider attention.

If you have a dark sense of humour yourself you will thoroughly enjoy the play. Gary delivers a wonderful performance ... especially as Smitty, the German PoW. And his convincing German accent is just one detail that adds to his generally strong stage presence.

Also as the cocky Mr Bravington (sporting a charming Yorkshire accent) he does a very good job.

He has many strong scenes as Smitty, but our favourite moment has to be Paul Freeman's delightful monologue as Mrs Mullen. Just this bit alone is worth to see the play.

The fact that this dark comedy was such a shocker in the 1970s, when it was put on the stage first, is hard to relate to nowadays. In the 'Tarantino' day of age our viewing is definitely used to far more drastic scenes.

The non-chronological order of the scenes gives the play a very modern format and even though it's already 30 years old it seems very up to date and fresh.

The intimate atmosphere of the theatre also adds to the success of the play. Every emotion presented feels so near and close that it comes across more intensely as it ever could in a big Westend venue.

Especially Gary's haunted character Smitty benefits from this closeness as every look of despair and madness jumps straight into the viewer's face and nothing of it gets lost in the distance of a wide auditorium.

So if you have a chance rush and be part of the event before it's all over!

All of you who have seen the play ... please write in and give us your view! We would love to add some of your reviews!

For a start here's what the Times had to say about it (even though we just agree in parts):

No way to bring home the bacon

The tasty smell of frying kidneys was probably what did it. Back in 1971 the Arts Council helped to finance the tour of Snoo Wilson's play and the questions were asked in Parliament as to why it was subsidising 'filth'. Pig's kidneys would have been OK but these particular organs had been tugged from a couple of recently killed human beings, and 'Disgusted of Westminster' wasnot happy.
What should have caused outrage was less the author's theatrical makebelieve than this disclosure of the horrors of factiry farming, and it is curious that this revival by Cactus Productions, otherwise well worth mounting, makes only glancing reference to what goes on in our industrialised countryside.
For reasons unexplained the play seems to have been cut by a third, from the 90 minutes indicated on the comany's website to the 60 that Anthony Banks directs.
Wilson presumably approves the shortening because he plays two of the roles, the owner of the pig farm in the 1940s and a sexually undiscriminating employee 25 years later. But as a result we see a man reaching his wits' end without learning what unlovely knowledge drove him there.
Wilson is not playing the killer but one of the reluctant organ donors, his assilant being Smitty, a German PoW who works on the farm until he begins killing the pigs at the wrong time and is consigned to an asylum. When he makes his escape he is hearing voices telling him that pigs are due to inherit the earth and he must aid them.
Just as the play swerves between the exterior and the interior worlds, so Banks, designer as well as director, combines the literal and the metaphor in his staging. He places the minimum of objects - enamel bath, pitchfork, stool, bucket - around an explosion of white paint at the centre of the floor, an image expressing Smitty's disordered mind as vivdly as the pig masks worn by his supernatural instructors.
I wish the play's argument came across as vividly. The confident performers hint at the cast's belief it is doing so, not only Wilson's two surly workers but Paul Freeman in his blonde wig as his woman, the first genteel, the second camply coarse. And more haunting than these is the Smitty of Gary Kemp (Ronnie in The Krays), forlorn, frowning, listening to other voices from other worlds.
But if Wilson intends a connection between atrocities in war and in the piggery he does not articulate it; some plotlines peter out, others barely peter in. His plas always beat a quirky path but the short cuts here make the play too shaddowy to follow.

by Jeremy Kingston
(taken from: The Times - 06.05.2004)

This review is also available online for Times Online subscribers at the Times Online webpage!

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And here are the winners of our five signed Pignight postcards ...

Ronnie from the UK
Laura from Spain
Julie from the UK
Elisa from Italy
Brit from Denmark

All five of you will find a signed postcard in your mailbox very soon!!!

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If you are interested in the complete script of the play, it's available for online purchase:

Amazon Website

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