An Awfully Big Adventure
Synopsis
It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan. ‘I don’t want any truck with symbolic interpretations.’ Meredith tells his actors. ‘As far as I’m concerned it’s all pure fantasy.’ O’Hara, who has come down from London to play Captain Hook, is relieved to hear it. But then neither Meredith nor O’Hara has taken into account the disturbing presence of Stella, the young Liverpool girl who has been hired as assistant stage manager. It is Stella, babbling of night lights in the nursery, of lost mothers and the ticking of clocks, who begins to revive an entirely different drama in which O’Hara is doomed to play the lead.
Author Biography
Dame Beryl Bainbridge was born in Lancashire in November 1934. She worked as an actress at Liverpool Repertory Theatre. She was awarded a DBE in 2000. She wrote her first novel, Harriet Said, during the 1950s, although it was not published until 1972. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times; The Dressmaker (1973); The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; An Awfully Big Adventure (1990) which was made into a film in 1995; Every Man For Himself (1996) which won the Whitbread Novel Award; and Master Georgie (1998) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).
