Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
I want to read the book!
All characters reduced
Backstairs Billy - cover

Backstairs Billy

Marcelo Dos Santos

Publisher: Nick Hern Books

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

'One can't help where one is born. Or one's station, of course. The trick to happiness is to be content where one is. Or so I am told.'
1979. Clarence House, London. The Queen Mother's receptions are in full swing and the champagne is flowing. Guiding the proceedings is William 'Billy' Tallon, page of the backstairs, keeper of the keys, holder of the royal corgis – and the royal secrets.
Outside the palace walls, unemployment, inflation and industrial action are bringing Britain to its knees, and the country is on the verge of changing seismically under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. These two worlds are about to collide, with dizzying consequences for everyone...
Backstairs Billy examines the fifty-year relationship between the Queen Mother and her most loyal, most outrageous servant, who joined her household at the age of fifteen. Marcelo Dos Santos's irreverent comedy was first produced by the Michael Grandage Company at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, in 2023, directed by Grandage and starring Penelope Wilton and Luke Evans.
Marcelo Dos Santos was named Most Promising Playwright at the 2024 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for Backstairs Billy (he was the joint winner of the award with Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini).
Available since: 11/16/2023.
Print length: 112 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Saari Not Sorry - cover

    Saari Not Sorry

    Annie Mick

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    What if there were another you? 
Another half you weren't aware of, yet others were? 
A life lived by someone who looks like you, but isn't you? 
And that's only the beginning of the story . . . and the complications. 
Saariella Hayes moved from California to New York with high expectations and a dream. Liam Jenkins was a handsome and dreamy, unexpected bonus. 
The dream turned into a nightmare, which in turn brought about a reality that shatters her world. 
While loyal friends and grumpy bodyguards help her pick up the pieces, only the man she loves can help her solve the puzzle. 
Recommended for 18+ audiences.
    Show book
  • Life Is a Disappearing Act - cover

    Life Is a Disappearing Act

    Ron Wallace

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    While the poetry you’ll read in Ron Wallace’s latest collection speaks of serious topics such as loss and the inescapable progression of time, you’ll also find plenty of humor in these pages. 
His words bring to life his beloved Oklahoma prairies and skies, and his own family members. 
Wallace’s reflections on childhood, his parents, and, of course, baseball, are heartwarming. 
Ron Wallace is an award-winning poet and adjunct English professor from Durant, Oklahoma. His soothing voice will bring the plains of Oklahoma to life.
    Show book
  • The King of Terrors - cover

    The King of Terrors

    Jim Johnstone

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    CBC BOOKS CANADIAN POETRY COLLECTIONS TO WATCH FOR IN FALL 2023What can we remove from ourselves and still be ourselves?
   

  Written after a brain tumour diagnosis, The King of Terrors is a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse. Johnstone's poems oscillate between the personal and the public, the clinical and the spiritual, so we're never quite sure what we are seeing, no matter how familiar."There is a moving, fierce intensity to The King of Terrors. Jim Johnstone knowingly reminds us that betrayals of the body are also betrayals of language, ‘each bloody / mouthful a sentence fragment.’ These are lines of admission, ambition, and harrowing truth, and Johnstone – despite a future only as certain ‘as the body // it inhabits’ – offers a form of redemption, for the fortitude of the sick, for poetry itself." – Randall Mann, author of Deal: New and Selected Poems 
"The King of Terrors is a luminous meditation on the otherworld of illness and treatment, contemplating the mysteries of death and the frontiers of mind and body with sharp clarity and radical vulnerability. These mesmerizing, urgent poems admit us not only to waiting rooms and brain scans, but also to the intimate fears that accompany the estranging experience of being unwell, or, as the poet says, living 'between / age and agency.' Haunting, stark, and lyrical, The King of Terrors is charged, as all the best poetry is, with the shock of the mortal." – Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar
    Show book
  • My Father's Fable - cover

    My Father's Fable

    Faith Omole

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    'Shall we have a real conversation? I am ready to stop pretending if you are.'
Peace didn't know what she needed when her father died. Then she found Bolu, her halfbrother from Nigeria, whom she didn't know existed. Filled with grief and a thousand questions, Peace ignores her mother's concerns, and invites Bolu to England. His arrival feels like something clicking into place.
But questions about this stranger's intentions and his mysterious past hang heavy in the air. Desperate to keep her fractured family – and herself – together, Peace must face the fact that the answers she desperately seeks might just lead to everything falling apart.
Faith Omole's play My Father's Fable is a gripping story of grief, belonging, and a family on the edge. It was first performed at the Bush Theatre, London, in 2024, directed by Rebekah Murrell.
    Show book
  • Twelfth Night - cover

    Twelfth Night

    William Shakespeare

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    A Shakespeare Society Production. 
 The complete play in five acts.
    Show book
  • Life is a long journey - cover

    Life is a long journey

    Kavya, Rody

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0 
    Story telling of Life is a long journey
    Show book