Kate Crehan wins the 2020 Tony Lothian Prize for her proposal But Will it Get a Laugh? The Life of Doris Hare in Three Acts
Doris Hare’s performance career, from child actress to Variety and the pre-war revues of Noel Coward and Andre Charlot to nationwide fame in the TV sitcom On the Buses, spans much of the 20th century. She rode the evolution of popular entertainment from the ‘portable’ theatres and ‘moving pictures’ of her working-class childhood to the arrival of film, radio and television. And such was her versatility, as her daughter shows, that she also later made forays into serious theatre at the Royal Court, RSC and National Theatre. Hare is the focus of a larger story of comedy, gender and class that shows what it was like to live and work through the seismic shifts in the landscape of entertainment, changes that transformed the performer/audience relationship forever.
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