Peter Gill, playwright and theatre director
Mean Tears
Home | Up | News | Pieces | Résumé | Pictures | Studio | Publications | Links

Christopher Hampton

Loading

Bookmark and Share

Bill Nighy and Karl Johnson in Peter Gill's National Theatre, Cottesloe, premiere of his play Mean Tears, July 1987  Photo: John Haynes

Mean Tears

by Peter Gill

National Theatre

Cottesloe, 22 July 1987

Length: about 2 hours and 15 minutes, including 15 minute interval

"This is a romantic drama which intelligently and movingly captures a clenched English intellectual world of lost friendship and sexual treachery, a world peopled by characters who all have the emptiness of a dead vodka bottle. Mean Tears is about sexual and romantic ownership; it's also about despair and revenge in a society where answer-phones are used like iron lungs and where possession is nine-tenths of the raw reality." Sheridan Morley, Punch, 1987

'Mean Tears catches perfectly the mixture of heartlessness, self-obsession and despair that characterised the late 1980s." John Burgess, Faber introduction

Credits
Julian Bill Nighy
Stephen Karl Johnson
Paul Garry Cooper
Celia Hilary Dawson
Nell Emma Piper
Director Peter Gill
Designer Alison Chitty
Lighting Stephen Wentworth
Production Manager Jason Barnes
Stage Manager Trish Montemuro
Deputy Stage Manager Angela Fairclough
Assistant Stage Manager Valerie Fox
Assistant Stage Manager Matthew Lynch
Sound Nic Jones
Assistant to the Lighting Designer Ian Williams
Production Assistant Andrew Sugars
Costume Supervisor Anna Watkins
Production Photographer John Haynes
Programme designed by Michael Mayhew
Programme designed by Rose Towler
Poster, programme cover design and photography Michael Mahew

Home | Up | Provincial Life | Breath of Life | The Aliens | Hens | Another Door Closed | Semper Dowland / Corridor | Small Change | Importance of Being Earnest | Gaslight | Look Back in Anger | The Voysey Inheritance | Epitaph for George Dillon | Days of Wine and Roses | Romeo and Juliet | Scenes from the Big Picture | Peter Gill Festival | York Realist | Radio plays | Luther | Speed-the-Plow | The Seagull | Friendly Fire | Certain Young Men | Mrs Klein | Tongue of a Bird | Cardiff East | A Patriot for Me | Uncle Vanya | New England | Way of the World | Juno and the Paycock | Marriage of Figaro | Harrison Birtwistle | Mean Tears | New Plays | Fool for Love, Lyric | Fool for Love | Antigone | Venice Preserv'd | Tales from Hollywood | Small Change (1983) | Kick for Touch | Major Barbara | Danton's Death | Much Ado (1981) | Don Juan | Month in Country | Scrape off the Black | Julius Caesar | Measure for Measure | Changeling | Cherry Orchard | Small Change (1976) | The Fool | As You Like It | Fishing | Twelfth Night | Merry-Go-Round | Schwieger Tochter | Crete and Sgt Pepper | Duchess of Malfi | Macbeth | Hedda Gabler | Landscape, Silence | Sleepers' Den (1969) | Over Gardens Out | Much Ado (1969) | Life Price | Daughter-in-Law tour | Lawrence season | O'Flaherty VC | Crimes of Passion | Daughter-in-Law (1967) | The Soldier's Fortune | A Provincial Life | O'Flaherty VC | Ruffian on the Stair | Local Stigmatic | Traverse | Albert Cobb | Collier's Friday Night | Sleepers' Den (1965)

Send mail to with questions or comments about this web site.  Copyright © 1999-2012

Last modified: 2012-03-15