One of the most bizarre and weirdly memorable stories of the last 20 years, the coughing major who cheated on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, is to be the centrepiece of a new stage play.
Called Quiz, it was written by the prolific James Graham, whose breakthrough work was This House originally performed at the National Theatre and currently showing in the West End. His new play was announced as a highlight of the 2017 Chichester Festival Theatre season, the first under the leadership of Daniel Evans and Rachel Tackley.
The coughing major is Charles Ingram, a former army officer who in 2001 successfully answered all of Chris Tarrant’s questions to win £1m. Suspicions were quickly raised and two years later he was found guilty of deception, a jury believing the charge that he used an accomplice to cough when an answer was correct.
“I remember being one of those people who watched it and couldn’t believe the story, couldn’t believe how dramatic it was,” said Graham.
The story itself is a compelling one but Graham said it was recent events which seemed to give it a resonance for now. “We are so obsessed at the moment about truth and what happens when justice becomes entertainment, when politics becomes purely performance and when reality becomes unreality and fantasy.
“There is something about the idea of looking at a story about the search for black and white answers and objective truths that seems quite exciting. But done through the bizarre prism of this incredibly surreal story.”
Graham has been a rising star in British theatre for a number of years and is a writer in demand. Among the things he has written since This House are Privacy – about mass surveillance and whistleblowing – for the Donmar Warehouse, the TV drama Coalition and the book for the musical Finding Neverland. A new play, Ink, exploring the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, will premiere this summer at the Almeida.
Graham said the idea of a play using the coughing major was brought to him and he soon realised “I could pour into it all my current anxieties about what is going on in the world at the moment.”
The play is expected to have the feel of a live quiz show with possible audience participation. It will also explore the wider “oddly endearing culture, quite middle class, quite southern English” of quiz fanatics, who were just waiting for something like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to be invented.
It will be directed by Evans, who succeeded Jonathan Church as artistic director last year, arriving after seven years in charge of Sheffield Theatres.
Other highlights include Sir Ian McKellen in the smaller Minerva theatre space for King Lear, a role he first played for the RSC in 2007. “I think he feels he wants another go at it,” said Evans. “And another go in a small space. He is approaching 80 and I think he feels he has to strike while the iron’s hot.”
Chichester has built a reputation for musicals that have gone on to have bigger success – Half a Sixpence, Gypsy and Guys and Dolls being the most recent.
Two musicals were announced for 2017, a new production of Fiddler on the Roof starring Omid Djalili and Tracy-Ann Oberman; and Michael Longhurst directing Sharon D Clarke in Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s Caroline, or Change.
Revivals will include a new production of Alan Bennett’s first West End play, Forty Years On, starring Richard Wilson; Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother directed by Richard Eyre; Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, starring Marcia Gay Harden; and Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy The Norman Conquests, directed by Blanche McIntyre.
Two other new plays will also be staged: The House They Grew Up in by Deborah Bruce and a “free-flowing” adaptation by Edna O’Brien of her own novel The Country Girls.
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