Tag: thehoneys

I was really tickled a few weeks back to receive an email from Oliver Houston, a playwright living in the UK who is working on a new piece that will reference Dahl’s failed play “Your Loving Wife” (aka “The Honeys”). Oliver has been researching the play but couldn’t confirm which theatre it played in Bournemouth. I joined his effort and was able to find a newspaper clipping from October 1956 that showed it was the Bournemouth Pavilion. I also found a reference to a collection of contemporary reviews at a museum in Wales. Oliver contacted the museum and shared with me his transcripts of the reviews, which I’ve now added to the site.

How cool is that? I love that even after nearly 30 years of working on this website, I can still get a stumper of a question and end up learning something new about Dahl.

I’ve added a couple more programs for The Honeys, Dahl’s ill-fated play that only ran for 36 performances on Broadway. I’ve since learned that the script was rewritten and retitled “Your Loving Wife” for a UK production in 1956. That one didn’t fare much better though! I also found a cool Charles Addams advertisement from the Broadway production.

The archive of The New York Times is a treasure trove. Recently I managed to find more than a dozen mentions of “The Honeys,” Roald Dahl’s one failed attempt at playwriting from 1955. It’s fascinating to trace the trajectory from the optimistic early days when the project was first kicking off, to the first indications of trouble (the director quit!), the eventual premiere, subsequent bad reviews, and ultimately its closing. Even at the end, Dahl was still vowing to rewrite and launch a new production in London. Looks like that never happened…