Roy Smiles: 15 books

Ten plays by comedic playwright Roy Smiles, available as an anthology or as single editions. Contains the plays Schmucks, Baghdad Boogie, Bombing People, Reno, The Lad Himself, Working for Mammon, Waugh in Winter, Reading Gaol, The VIP, and The Weight of Days.

April 1994. A man sits alone in an attic extension on the cusp of becoming a Seattle suicide statistic. This man is no 'number and name' to be reported in a local newspaper. He is an icon, albeit a reluctant one. Kurt Cobain, the frontman of Nirvana, is about to pull the trigger of the gun in his...

Reno is the story of actress Marilyn Monroe and playwright Arthur Miller’s marriage imploding in Nevada during the making of her last movie The Misfits. Miller is the writer, Monroe the star, but Miller finds himself the referee between Marilyn and tyrannical director John Huston, as she finds comfort...

Schmucks was first staged at Battersea Arts Centre in 1992 with William Marsh as Lenny Bruce and David Mayberry as Groucho Marx. It was revised and reworked under the sponsorship of director Terry Johnson at the National Theatre workshops in 2000. It was re-staged at The Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia...

Arriving in Limbo after his lonely end in Australia Tony Hancock finds himself in a hospital waiting room very much like the waiting room in The Blood Donor. There he is met with the red tape and bureaucracy that drove him mad in life; a Galton and Simpson-esque tribute to possibly the greatest comedian of his generation.

1948: George Orwell is attempting to finish his final novel - Nineteen Eighty Four - before ill-health forces him off the solated Scottish island he has made his home. Holed up with a shotgun and literary-circle bombshell Sonia Brownell for company he’s desperately hoping for a last chance at happiness. But...

Bombing People was originally staged at Jermyn Street Theatre in 2000 (with a brilliant central performance from Michael Fitzgerald as the lead) and restaged in Sweden in 2006. It concerns Ralph Sherman, an advertising executive, who finds himself in an asylum in the Deep South in 1962 after...

Under pressure to write The Goon Show to end all Goon shows, Spike Milligan is planning his escape from a mental institution dressed in only his pyjamas. After applying to the British Museum to get his marbles back, he starts to lose his grip on reality and threatens to kill all the Goons. Will his...

Working for Mammon is a comedy drama about the London Riots of 2012 when the city seemed to go mad for a week and every shop with training shoes got looted. It concerns a teacher defeated by life who shelters a sixteen-year-old girl on the run from the police and a drug dealer who finds in her joy for life a new meaning to go on.

Waugh in Winter is a piece about Evelyn Waugh, the acerbic right-wing author of Brideshead Revisited. A supposed BBC interviewer from Woman’s Hour has come to interview ‘the cultural dinosaur’. What begins as a useful ploy by Waugh to taunt and sneer at a woman of a lower class becomes an examination...

Baghdad Boogie is set some time during the Iraq Crisis. A long term Canadian captive (Doug) finds himself in the same filth stained room as an oil executive American (Sean). As they face a long period of incarceration together the subject of war and imperialism is raised as Doug begins to unravel...

Reading Gaol concerns Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Gaol after his infamous court case, persecuted relentlessly by the sadistic and pious prison governor for refusing to admit he is a common criminal. George Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, Sid Edward Carson and Lord Alfred Douglas appear as...

The Weight of Days concerns Albert Camus and his political and literary feud with Jean-Paul Sartre over the Algerian War of Independence in 1950’s Paris. A young woman named Edith adds to the flames of jealousy and anger between the two writing masters. Camus was split over Algeria. He knew...

In The VIP, Welsh film and theatre icon Richard Burton is trapped at a fog-bound Heathrow Airport in 1968 shortly after finishing filming Where Eagles Dare. He is haunted by visions of his wives Sybil and Elizabeth Taylor; his drinking companions Dylan Thomas and Peter O’Toole and his miner father....