Play gives new lease of life to Marigoldies!
PACK your bags for the stage play based on the book that spawned the hit film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, starring those formidable dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
The story of a group of British retirees lured to spend their sunset years in the warmer climes of what turned out to be a dilapidated old pile in Bangalore struck a chord when author Deborah Moggach published her novel These Foolish Things 17 years ago.
And the film version, directed by John Madden, took more than £120million at the box office when it was released in 2012 — raking in even more than that in video sales.
Moggach told me she has adapted her book into a drama that will open at Richmond Theatre for a two-week run from August 30. It will then tour the UK into 2023, before heading to the West End.
And she said she’s enjoyed revisiting the characters she created: the seven retirees outsourced from the Home Counties to a hotel in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, run by budding entrepreneur Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel in the film).
‘I felt that they’ve been literally waiting in the wings all this time for their moment on the stage,’ she said, adding ‘I’m bringing them alive again, with the holograms of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith hovering over them, which is rather fascinating. I’ll see who we cast!’ Moggach and producer Simon Friend both stressed that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel play, directed by Lucy Bailey, will be based solely on the book, not the film, ‘though I’ve had to change it a lot because there are peripheral characters we don’t need any more,’ said the author.
KEy characters for the show will include Evelyn, a retired librarian, and Muriel, a bookkeeper — Dench and Smith in the movie. Both versions of Moggoch’s tale — page and screen — prompted a sea-change in attitudes ‘to what we call old people’, Moggach noted.
She believes that ‘old people aren’t old at all... we’re exactly the same as we always were! We’ve just got more wrinkles. I’m 73, but I feel 34, actually.’ At its heart, the story is about ‘living rather than dying, and about making the most of your life, if you’re up for it’, she added.
Producer Friend said that a read-through of Moggach’s play was held recently with casting now under way.
He’s also come to an arrangement with 20th Century Studios about using the more familiar Exotic Marigold Hotel title for the show, rather than These Foolish Things, like the book.