Who @ 50

Poster for Who @ 50, created by Colin Brockhurst

From 17th-30th November Manchester will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the BBC's beloved science fiction series Doctor Who with its very own Who @ 50 fringe festival, comprising screenings, performances, interview panels and other entertainments in a number of venues across the city centre. Scytheplays. in association with Lass Productions, is excited to be able to contribute to proceedings by producing two live stage adaptations of two of the series' earliest adventures.

Phil Dennison as the First Doctor.
When the Doctor was a young man, he was an old man...
Photo by Andrew Greenland, with lighting and design by Peter Michael George and Paul Anderton

An Unearthly Child by Anthony Coburn was the first ever episode of Doctor Who, broadcast on 23rd November 1963, and the Scytheplays team, working from original BBC camera scripts, have adapted it to be staged in Manchester's Fab Cafe on the 17th, 18th, 19th and the anniversary itself, 23rd November 2013.  Popular fringe actor Phil Dennison (Lass Productions' Porridge and Hot Fat), working with Scytheplays for the fourth time (after The Ballad of Halo Jones, The Year of the Sex Olympics and V for Vendetta) plays the first ever incarnation of the Doctor, as originally played by William Hartnell.  Laura Plows, recently seen as Eden Page in Scytheplays' Hotel Midnight, plays Barbara Wright, while Ian Chesterton is played by Edward Barry and Susan Foreman, the Doctor's grand-daughter, by Jess Heaps.

Following An Unearthly Child the same team will mount a production of another of the series' earliest adventures, 1964's The Edge of Destruction by David Whittaker, again performing at Fab Cafe on the 23rd, 24th and 25th November.

Poster art for An Unearthly Child & The Edge of Destruction
Designed by Colin Brockhurst

Tickets are £4 on the door, or £7.50 on the 23rd (which will be a double-bill performance of both An Unearthly Child and The Edge of Destruction), and can be booked in advance via WeGotTickets.com at the below links.

An Unearthly Child: Sunday November 17th, 5.30pm
An Unearthly Child: Sunday November 17th, 7pm
An Unearthly Child: Monday November 18th, 7pm
An Unearthly Child: Tuesday November 19th, 7pm

Double-bill: Saturday November 23rd, 2pm

The Edge of Destruction: Sunday November 24th, 3pm
The Edge of Destruction: Monday November 25th, 7pm

Please note: These are not-for-profit performances and all money raised will be donated to the Alzheimer's Society, in recognition of the ailment tragically suffered, towards the end of his life, by William Hartnell.  The performances are produced by Gareth Kavanagh and Terry Naylor, designed by Terry Naylor and directed by Daniel Thackeray.

Other events in Who @ 50 will include: Adventures in Time and Space: 50 Years in 50 Rels, a new comedy play by Ian Winterton which has the ambitious aim of compressing the whole history of Who into one hour; special screenings of the seminal William Hartnell film This Sporting Life, the behind-the-scenes drama An Adventure in Space and Time and the Doctor Who Fiftieth Anniversary special The Day of the Doctor; Doctor Who-themed performances by the Comedy Sportz UK Improv Troupe, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre, comedy open mic night Wet Feet, and performance poet Rod Tame; and interview panels with Doctor Who comic artists Adrian Salmon and Martin Geraghty; Who and Coronation Street producer Phil Collinson; and the programme's first-ever director, the legendary Waris Hussein, who will be present for the first performance of An Unearthly Child, having directed the original version in 1963.

For booking links and details for all the events in the festival, go to www.WeGotTickets.com and search under "Who At Fifty".