No Sex Please, We’re British

2007 season · Production archive

Peter Hunter and his new bride Frances are happily settling into their apartment until Frances innocently sends away for what she thinks will be Scandinavian glassware. Instead she gets photographs of… well, let’s just say there are three girls and a trampoline involved. The parcels keep arriving, along with Peter’s boss, his mother, the police, the bank examiner and the girls with the big rubber cudgel. How will it all end?

Written by

Anthony Marriott & Alistair Foot

Directed by

Arthur Goodman

Ran

March 2 – April 7, 2007

About the production

The original London production ran for more than sixteen years, which makes this one of the longest-running comedies in West End history and an unusually safe bet for a small house. British bedroom farce is built for exactly the Vic’s constraints: one set, a great many doors, and a plot that accelerates rather than expands.

Doors were the practical problem. Farce depends on entrances that are fast, loud and slightly too close together, and a basement stage with limited wing space has to solve that with carpentry rather than architecture. Reviewers noticed the company got the tempo right, which in this genre is the whole review.

What the press said

“…a thoroughly entertaining evening of theatre…(cast with) some very fine actors…Not to be missed.”

“…a surprisingly confident, playful run…in the great tradition of farce”

Where it sat in the season

It was production 2 of 8 in the Vic’s 2007 season. It followed Twelfth Night (Jan 12 – Feb 17, 2007) and was followed by Dead Man Walking (Apr 20 – Jun 7, 2007). The full year is set out on the season calendars page, and every production the theatre staged between 2005 and 2011 is indexed in the production archive.

The house’s standard pattern was Friday and Saturday evenings at 7.30 with a Sunday matinee, over a run of six to eight weeks. With seventy-five seats, a full eight-week run put roughly 1,800 people through the room — which a 500-seat theatre does in four nights, and which is the single fact that explains most of what the Vic chose to programme.

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This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.