Peter Lantos

On Monday 5 March 2018 a rather unusual event happened at Tate Britain. After the venerable museum closed its doors to the public, and reopened to a group of special friends, a rehearsed reading of Peter Lantos’s fourth play, Light and Shadow took place in the Tissot Room of the exhibition of Impressionists in London.

This play was written well before the exhibition was even conceived, but its presentation in a room full of Tissot’s pictures was an extraordinarily happy coincidence. The play is the story of Tissot’s extraordinary love affair with Kate Newton – the muse of many of his paintings – a beautiful, divorced, Irish Catholic with an illegitimate child. Their love survived the official prejudices of the puritanical Victorian era and only ended with Kate’s premature death. Tissot, the most successful chronicler of London’s social life left for Paris after three days of mourning, never to return.

The play was directed by Sarah Berger in the production of the So and So Arts Club. Ben Porter played Tissot, and Georgie Oulton was Kate. Other actors included Jessica Claire, Nigel Fairs, Sian E Green and George Potts.

Despite the inclement weather of freezing cold and icy snow on 1 March 2018, The Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden, London was full for the first rehearsed reading of Stolen Years. The play reflects the febrile times of 1989 on the eve of the collapse of Communism in Hungary. Four friends meet in an apartment in Budapest after thirty years. One of them, Robi has returned from New York where he fled after the failed Revolution of 1956. His arrival revives painful memories of deceit, torture and lies, and triggers the uncertainties of the future.

The play was directed by Dave Spencer in the production of the So and So Arts Club. The cast included Kate Harper, Keith Hill, Tony Keetch and Louise Templeton.