Yesterday Matthew O'Neill (Alan) and Daniel Thackeray (Sir Clive) visited the BBC Radio Manchester studios at MediaCityUK to discuss
Together in Electric Dreams. You can hear the interview via YouTube
here.
Meanwhile, on the same day Elaine O'Flynn reviewed the play for the
Manchester Evening News, and her article is reproduced below.
Switch off your iPhones, forget your kindle - it's time to go back to the Eighties, when mobile phones were the size of bricks and Apple was just a fruit.
In the cramped upstairs backroom of the Lass O'Gowrie, Together in Electric Dreams
held its premiere performance, as part of the Manchester Fringe Festival.
The play, based loosely on true events, centres around a meeting of two technological juggernauts of their age, Sir Clive Sinclair, maker of the pocket calculators and early home computers, and EastEnder 'boy done good' Alan Sugar, MD of Amstrad.
Set in 1986, the pair meet in a Japanese restaurant to bash out a deal for Amstrad to buy Sinclair Research before the bailiffs come knocking.
Over the hour-long performance we watch a battle of negotiations two very different businessmen. Daniel Thackeray, also the director, gave an uncanny performance of stern, polite Sinclair - fighting ever so nicely to keep his job - while Matthew O'Neill portrayed a charismatic Sugar, before his Sir Alan days.
Meanwhile Naomi Sumner, who played waitress Akiko, got laughs for her abrupt service style, most of all when she served Sugar a traditional Japanese meal - of bangers and mash.
The dialogue was slick and quick with technical references to computing systems gone by, and brought many a nostalgic laugh - not least when Sugar gets to try his hand at the Sinclair C5, the company's doomed battery powered tricycle.
It was, ironically enough, littered with technical difficulties, but nonetheless was entertaining.
Altogether a lot of laughs and worth a trip down memory lane.
Not a bad review at all! Many thanks to Elaine for kindly permitting its reproduction.
