Last night I saw "A Red Plaid Shirt" by the late Michael Wilmot, a London Community Players production at the Palace Theatre. It is a truly brilliant play and the acting is excellent.
The play involves two couples, all four of whom have retired. The women seem to have adjusted reasonably well, but the men are lost without their careers, and they are struggling to find themselves. If they can't find themselves, then their wives want them to at least find something to do.
It is absolutely hilarious, which is so typical of Wilmot's plays, and yet it has depth, meaning, and insight. It goes beyond standard sitcom-type humour, and it isn't really farcical either. It's witty. It's bright. It's full of surprises and, to repeat myself it is absolutely hilarious. In the photo below, John Garlicki is shown in one of his best ever performances, as he considers buying a motorcycle and dreams of becoming another Easy Rider.
The audience was in stitches throughout the play. If there was any failing in the performance, it was that the actors seemed unprepared for the amount of laughter and continued their dialogues through it all, and we missed some of the lines as a result.
"A Red Plaid Shirt" is one of the funniest, wittiest plays I have ever seen. See this play.
And let me add that if you have anything at all to do with community theatre anywhere, get this play and perform it. Even if you aren't involved with community theatre, take a look at the samples of his scripts at his website: https://www.wilmotscripts.com/script-samples-etc.html. You'll enjoy reading what is available there.
Side note: I knew Michael Wilmot, and I always enjoyed his works. I even had the pleasure of performing a play written by him and his partner, Lynda Martens, for 24-Hours at TAP, a play they wrote together overnight and that four of us performed the next evening.
If there were a compendium of his plays available on Amazon, I'd buy it, in part to honour Michael, but mostly because his writing just that good.