B E D 

A playful and poignant 'Pocket Sprung' Musical 
Instead of a honeymoon, newly-weds, Ben and Alice, buy a luxury divan. Twenty years of marriage milestones in 60 minutes; love, betrayal, loss and dirty linen.
We spend a third of our lives in bed .... If only Beds could talk!

'Tell us a bit more about BED ..'.

BED starts where most romcoms end, with the beginning of a marriage.  Couple-next-door newly-weds, BEN and ALICE, are making their brand-new luxury bed which they’ve invested in instead of a honeymoon and are looking forward to years of married bliss.
 
A sung-through musical, this is an unromantic story about love. 
Most of the action takes place around the bed itself: twenty years of marriage, told through a series of musical tableaux, selectively depicting the highs and lows, the follies and the foibles, the passion and claustrophobia, the laughter and the dirty linen. The mixture of humour and pathos produced an extremely positive audience reaction at the Brighton Fringe previews.. 
 

'What was the inspiration behind writing it?'
 
When Tim (writer) and his first wife were broke and starting a home in the 80’s, they inherited a bed from his great Aunt. A bed bought in the late 20’s, a bed in which said great Aunt had died, and where Tim’s uncle was born.  As soon as they could afford to, they replaced it with an IKEA futon, functional and lacking any kind of back story. Tim often reflected on the life the old bed must have seen; how the longevity of beds as family heirlooms was once the norm; but how, more recently, his children’s generation would never consider tolerating a second-hand mattress, however broke they were!
 
The emotional context of the story lies in a mixture of semi-autobiographical material, and the experiences of friends of our generation, coping, with various levels of success, with the pressures of modern marriage, separations (temporary or otherwise) involving children, and various kinds of compromise allowing love to endure. Tim and Alan (composer) being of an age when our own kids are getting married or actively deciding not to, also gives one a certain perspective. 
 
We always relish a new challenge: in this case writing a sung-through musical; which was a huge change of gear from the cast of eleven, including actor-muso’s, required for SAN DOMINO (Alan and Tim’s most recent musical, Tristan Bates Theatre, London, June 2018 -  set in an Italian prison camp for gay men in 1930’s Italy.)

We hope you enjoy the show.