Cooking With Elvis' & 'Bollocks' (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Two comic plays aby Lee Hall which have had success at the Edinburgh Festival and are coming to London in February 2000 Cooking with Elvis is a domestic play that is both farcical and upsetting. Mam and Jill live together in an uneasy calm. Jill is overweight and a fiendish cook who whips up one exotic dish after another. Her father (and Mam's husband) is stuck in a wheel chair as the result of a stroke. He can neither speak nor move, but he can hear. He was a famous Elvis impersonator and from time to time steps out of the wheel chair in a series of fantasy scenes to give stirring renditions of some of Elvis's most famous hits. But Mam brings into the house a new young lover whose presence in the house become the source for hilarity and big time trouble. The ending is a deadly one, you can be sure. The play has been compared to the early black farces of Joe Orton. Also included in this volume is Bollocks!, Lee Hall's contemporary version of the Expressionist German playwright Ernst Toller's Hinkemann, which has been updated from twenties Bavaria to contemporary Tyneside.