Wilder Gutterson

Annie Wobbler (Revisited) It certainly must be an exciting honour for an actress to have an esteemed playwright pen a one-woman play expressly for you. But that is exactly what happened to Nicola McAuliffe in 1981 when Arnold Wesker wrote Annie Wobbler especially for her. The play, again featuring McAuliffe, has now been updated to reflect the changes of the 45 intervening years, and Annie Wobbler (Revisited) currently is running at the Finborough Theatre in West London.

The story of gay Irishmen who came to London in the late 1980s to escape the prejudice and hatred they experienced in their own country is one worth telling. Mammy’s House, created by Derek Murphy and Amy Clarke, takes us into the lives of some of those men during the AIDS crisis, and, importantly, remembers not only those who died but the people who nursed and cared for them when so many others walked away.

Based on the 2014 film Pride, the new musical at the National Theatre tells the remarkable true story of a collection of London gay and lesbian activists who set out to support striking Welsh miners during the bitter miners’ strike of 1984. It is an unlikely alliance — gay activists and striking miners hardly seem natural bedfellows — but the two factions gradually discover that they have more in common than either could have imagined.