There is much mystery surrounding the West End production of Daytona. Even though it played last year at the Park Theatre, where it was successful enough to earn its current transfer to the Theatre Royal Haymarket, the Daytona team are staying tighter lipped than Rainbow’s Zippy.
Even talking to us on stage in the West End LIVE spiegeltent, Maureen Lipman and her co-star Oliver Cotton, who also wrote Daytona, couldn’t be drawn about the contents of the play.
We know Lipman and Harry Shearer play a couple of 50 years preparing for a ballroom dancing class. We know Cotton plays a long lost brother who returns with an extraordinary story. But more than that – unless you saw the show last year – remains a mystery.
Do we learn more from these rehearsal images? That surely depends on how good we are as detectives. Sofas, coats and a squirming Shearer don’t give us much to go on, but it’s all we have until the production begins previews next week.