Patricia Routledge

Patricia Routledge is to undertake a major UK tour of Alan Bennett’s Office Suite, starting 14 May at the Theatre Royal, Bath. The tour will follow the show's appearance as a feature of the Chichester Festival Theatre Summer Season in April, as previously reported.  It is a double-bill of two one-act comedies, A Visit from Miss Prothero and Green Forms, which Bennett wrote especially for Routledge and which she originally performed on television. Edward Petherbridge co-stars in A Visit from Miss Prothero, and Edward Kemp directs.

In both plays, Bennett offers a typically wry and insightful look at the foibles and frustrations of office life in the days before the internet. In A Visit from Miss Prothero, Petherbridge’s Mr Dodson is retired from his job in management systems and is content to potter, chat to Millie his budgie and pursue an interest in cordon bleu cookery. However his relaxed routine comes under threat when his one-time colleague, the titular Miss Prothero, decides to visit.

In Green Forms, Doreen and Doris are two dilatory office workers comfortably installed in an obscure office within a huge corporate organisation. They are happy to while away their day dealing with departmental intrigues of artificial hips, rubber plants and feuds over an appropriated washbasin plug. It is only with the arrival of a green form and the spectre of Dorothy Binns that their world becomes a little less ordered.

Routledge’s West End credits include Little Mary Sunshine, Noises Off, The Importance of Being Earnest andThe Solid Gold Cadillac. She played Aunt Nettie in the 1993 production of Carousel and was recently seen in the The Best of Friends at the Hampstead Theatre. She made her Broadway debut in the musical Darling of the Day, for which she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She has appeared in films including To Sir, With Love and Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, and on television in Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads and as her most famous creation, Hyancinth Bouquet, in Keeping Up Appearances.

[AD]Petherbridge was a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company in the 1960s, and he created the role of Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. He has worked extensively for both the RSC and the National since then. He played Newman Noggs in the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby in 1980 and was twice nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play, first for his reprise of Noggs in Nicholas Nickleby's Broadway transfer, and again for his performance alongside Glenda Jackson in Strange Interlude. His West End credits include Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Woman in White.

The cast also includes David Bannerman, Janet Dale and Carole Street.

The tour begins at Theatre Royal, Bath (14-19 May), then travels to Theatre Royal Plymouth (21-26 May), Richmond Theatre, Surrey (28 May-2 June), Salford Lowry (4-9 June), and Theatre Royal Glasgow (11-16 June) ending at Malvern Theatre, Worcs (18-23 June).