Maxine Peake in
On the Third Day
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Kate Betts’ On the Third Day, the winning play from Channel 4's series The Play's The Thing, is closing early. The drama will now finish its run at the West End’s New Ambassadors Theatre on 29 July (not 2 September as originally announced).
Chosen from over 2000 submissions by a panel composed of producer Sonia Friedman (whose company produced the production with Channel 4), literary agent Mel Kenyon and actor Neil Pearson, the world premiere production was directed by Robert Delamere and starred Maxine Peake, Paul Hilton and Tom McKay. The production was originally conceived by Stephen Pimlott, who withdrew following an illness.
"Producing a play by a first-time writer in the West End was always going to be a fascinating challenge, which is why I agreed to participate in the Channel 4 series The Play's The Thing,” producer Friedman said in a statement. “Plays produced in smaller subsidised theatres which run for six weeks and are seen by smaller audiences than the ones enjoyed by On The Third Day are routinely seen as a success. That is why I believe that a seven-week run for a production of a new play by a first-timer writer in the West End playing to audiences of 51% per cent should be seen as an achievement. I would also like to add that The Play's The Thing has been a very useful exercise in stimulating a debate about new work by new writers in the West End. I am very grateful to Channel 4 for devoting so much of their mainstream schedule to a programme about theatre, the West End, and new writing."
On the Third Day opened on 20 June to less than stellar reviews. In his Theatre.com Review of the piece, Mark Shenton wrote: “Betts’ play is nothing if not ambitious in its bold and frequent shifts of location and time—the action sweeps from such locations as the planetarium at Greenwich’s Royal Observatory to an underground cave that two characters abseil into—but it is also too densely layered and fractured to engage the heart as well as the mind.”