The Lavender Hill Mob hits the Chichester Festival Theatre stage

After touring in the autumn, the stage version is now back on the road for the New Year with dates including Chichester Festival Theatre from January 10-14 and Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre from January 24-28. It tells the tale of Henry Holland (Miles), an unassuming bank clerk who dreams of stealing the van full of gold bullion he drives across London each day. When Henry learns that his new lodger makes Eiffel Tower paperweights out of lead, he devises a plan to make his dream a reality. Based on the screenplay by T E B Clarke, it has been adapted for the stage by Phil Porter. The film was released in 1951, directed by Charles Crichton, starring Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway and Sid James, as well as Audrey Hepburn in one of her earliest screen appearances.

“We started rehearsing on September 9,” Miles said, “and we opened in Cheltenham a month or so later. It was quite a short rehearsal time for something that was really quite complicated. I remember getting a text message from Justin Edwards (who plays the lodger) saying ‘The Lavender Hill Mob now?’ And I looked at my emails and there was an email offering me this. I saw that they had offered the other part to Justin. We were going to do Comedy of Errors together at the RSC and then Covid put paid to that. We had rehearsed it but we never did it and then the new dates didn't work for us.

“I knew the film of The Lavender Hill Mob pretty well. I've seen it quite a few times. I remember seeing quite a lot of the Ealing comedies. Passport to Pimlico was my favourite but yes, I was familiar with it. They were called Ealing comedies but they were sort of capers really. They were quite fun and gentle, not some kind of serious analysis of the gig economy. They were all about identifiable people having a bit of an adventure and there was a lovely 50s morality to it. It's not like Oceans 11 where you can get away with it! It's a jolly caper and I love the fact that it is a bit of escapism. And there is a lot of stuff going on at the moment that is not terribly pleasant that we might actually want to get away from!

“The lovely thing is that you can't update it. It has got to be set at the time. If you try to update it you would be talking about cryptocurrency or something like that!“My character is described as living the life of a nonentity. He has just worked as a clerk in the bullion office at the Bank of England all these years and he's a man who appears to be satisfied on the surface but in fact he is deeply dissatisfied. He is deeply frustrated, I suppose, by the mundanity of his existence. He's one of that sea of bowler hats and he wants to escape. There's definitely a financial gain that he is looking for but he is also a man that has a lots to ponder in this play. There's a missing part in the jigsaw and then suddenly the missing piece slots into place...”