Matthew Parker and Katherine Reilly in The Play with Speeches

ANTHONY and Penny are in a bit of a fix. They’re all set to audition actors for a play they are preparing to put on when they realise the box office has mistakenly allowed an actual real, paying audience into the venue.

What to do? After fulsome apologies, the pair decide to carry on with their “auditions” with their real-life audience in tow.

And so begins the play within a play, meta-theatrical comedy The Play with Speeches, from theatre company Olive & Stavros, which will be Upstairs at The Gatehouse in Highgate in June.

Imagine Michael Frayn’s Noises Off crossed with a mind-bending fever dream and you get the idea.

As each actor auditions, reading the said speeches which have been put together by Anthony, there is yet another drama unfolding. We soon realise there is unfinished business between Anthony and Penny and their barbed exchanges punctuate the various actors’ auditions.

Snapshots of their past ill-fated relationship emerge with barely concealed contempt. A power struggle ensues between Anthony and Penny, the director of the planned play.

James Woolf, who lives in Friern Barnet, adapted The Play with Speeches, from a short story he wrote during the pandemic.

“The short story was specifically written from the perspective of a kind of disenfranchised playwright if you like, or a pretty cynical playwright, who puts together this anthology of audition speeches,” he said.

“But he’s tinkered with them a little bit with the playwrights’ permission to make them all tell a story. So certain names and so forth have been changed and Anthony even includes a few speeches from his own back catalogue that have hitherto been unperformed.

“I think the audience has particular fun as this sort of car crash of a relationship between Anthony and Penny unravels before them.

“Anthony starts with sort of quite high praise, albeit in a slightly nuanced way, about her directing. By the end of the first act, they are completely at loggerheads with each other really and laying bare all the grisly details of their relationship.”

We are treated to the hammy audition speeches and with each one another story unfolds. It is a feat of superb writing that hangs together beautifully.

“I like breaking the fourth wall and enjoy playing with it,” says James. “I’m instinctively drawn to that kind of theatre and I definitely wanted it for this play for the audience – to be brought in more and more as it goes on and to really feel a part of it without being too much of a burden on them, or being put in positions where they’re really uncomfortable.”

He clearly had fun writing this play.

“I do enjoy art within art. You can have a kind of two-way relationship between what’s in the play, or what’s in the piece of art within the work and what’s actually happening in the main story and I guess, to a certain extent I tried to do that a bit with this play.”

James, who works as a policy advisor at The Law Society, writes short stories, poetry and has written short films, radio plays and adverts. But the pull of the theatre is strong. He had his first play professionally produced in the mid-90s.

“I’ve done lots of different kinds of work but I think theatre is probably the thing I find easiest and it’s how I started writing,” he says. “It was my first kind of love in terms of writing. I had a play on at Edinburgh when I was a student, and my first professional play was produced in around 1995 and at The Man in the Moon in Chelsea. I’ve sort of continued since then, so it’s been quite a long time.”

He believes people are craving the opportunity for a little fun at the theatre and been heartened by audience’s reaction to the play at its previous productions.

“There’s a lot of fairly dark and depressing stuff going on at the moment,” he says. “The world is a pretty depressing place.

“What’s been great about this piece is how much people have appreciated seeing a comedy. I would say that something that takes you out of yourself and allows you to forget everything for a couple of hours is quite welcome.”

• The Play with Speeches is at Upstairs at The Gatehouse, 1 North Road, Highgate Village, N6 4BD from June 13-18. See www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com or box office: 020 8340 3488
• More information about Olive & Stavros at www.oliveandstavros.com/