Touching physical comedy comes to Cast in Doncaster

Waiting for Stanley takes us back to 1945 and a railway station platform where a wife is anxiously waiting for her husband, Stanley, to return from the front. The train arrives full of homecoming soldiers but her Stanley doesn’t appear… Throughout this touching physical comedy, suitcases transform into radios, cribs, typewriters and a whole host of other props; clowning and puppetry combine to paint a picture of how life was for London’s women during the war.

With flashbacks to experiences on the Home Front, intercut with fantasies of what may have happened to Stanley, this pacy story is based entirely on real-life experiences. There’s the getting by with ration book recipes, the excitement of leaving a job as a typist and starting one as a motorcycle courier, and, most of all, the ache of separation from a husband at the front and a child evacuated to the country, with only letters to hold on to…

This one-woman show is performed by two-time London Cabaret Award winner Leela Bunce. Leela is a specialist in Laughter Yoga, known for its healing and uplifting benefits to provide full mental relaxation and physical energy. She has appeared on Loose Women, This Morning, BBC Radio 1 and BBC Radio 2 demonstrating how unconditional laughter combined with yogic breathing soon turns into real and contagious laughter.

Presented to critical and audience acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2012, Waiting for Stanley was created with real life testimonies from interviews with women and veterans from the Royal British Legion and from letters and diaries in the Imperial War Museum archives. Award winning theatre company Finger in the Pie, in association with Greenwich Theatre, bring the UK tour to Cast, Doncaster in 2015 – the 70th anniversary of the end of the war.

Tickets for Waiting for Stanley on Tuesday 21 April at 2pm and 7.45pm are £10.50 adults / £8.50 concessions* available from Cast’s Box Office on 01302 303 959 or castindoncaster.com. Limited tickets are available for the matinee show followed by Afternoon Tea for only £16.50 / £14.50 including a selection of sandwiches, scones and cakes.

*Includes 50p per ticket booking fee, not charged if paying by cash