Guardianista neighbours in £720,000 flat
REMAIN-BACKING playwrights Eve Leigh and Tom Penn do not look out of place in trendy Camberwell, but last night they were branded ‘neighbours from hell’ by a Johnsonsupporting Tory MP.
After the pair admitted their role in briefing The Guardian about Carrie Symonds’s and Boris Johnson’s nocturnal activities, allies and friends of Mr Johnson and Ms Symonds pointed to their neighbours’ anti-Brexit sentiment and ‘hatred’ of the Tory Party.
Ms Leigh is the daughter of multi-millionaire musical theatre producer Mitch Leigh. A successful writer, she was the star of a theatre project called Brexit Stage Left, which received financial backing from Eurodram, a cultural campaign funded with Brussels cash.
Eurodram’s website reveals it is ‘co-funded by the Creative European Programme of the European Union’.
The event in January described itself as a ‘festival of staged readings of provocative cuttingedge plays from across the EU’. The former palm-reader bought her luxurious flat above Carrie Symonds’s apartment for £720,000 in April last year.
In March this year, she married her partner Tom.
Last night he confirmed that he had backed Remain in the EU referendum, but insisted that had nothing to do with the weekend’s events.
Ms Leigh was described by one interviewer as an ‘American Leftist Buddhist Jewish playwright’.
Her religious outlook influenced the theme of her most recent play, The Trick, which tackles the topics of ageing and coping with grief. However, it received mixed reviews from critics.
The Evening Standard called it ‘a mystifying muddle’ and said ‘it’s all increasingly wearisome’.
The Guardian gave it two stars and said it was ‘overbearing in its manipulative attempts to make us feel sad’.
Other work by the playwright includes ‘a documentary audio piece about childhood, told through the prism of a Bulgarian borstal’.
Mr Penn has yet to match his wife’s levels of fame or critical attention in the theatre world.