The Funtington Players tackle 60s classic Alfie

The Funtington Players will bring it all back when they present the play that inspired the film. Gill Lambourn will be directing for the Funtington Players for the first time, with the production running from Tuesday, March 28-Saturday, April 1 at West Ashling Village Hall. Tickets £12 on www.ticketsource.co.uk/funtingtonplayers

Living on charm and humour, Alfie manages to make us love him despite his somewhat heartless behaviour. He’s a man who has learned that in this life allowing anyone into your heart leads only to disaster – which means it is better to cut and run, again and again and again.

Gill said: “It was my choice to do it. I've directed it before and it was great fun and it sold really well. It is still a play that people of a certain age remember, people that go to the theatre. It is still a play that is well known and well loved. I think I must have seen the film when it first came out or soon after, and I suppose like most people I probably just thought that Michael Caine was excellent in the part. It was a big film at the time and everyone when they hear about it talk about the swinging 60s and mini skirts and Carnaby Street but actually I think it has much more in common in the late 50s. It was stage play in 1963, really early in the 60s and I think the people in the play are not people that are necessarily that young. They are people that would have been born pre-war and would have lived through the war. Rather than mini skirts and Mary Quant, I think they are people that have got a lot more in common with the Saturday Night Sunday Morning era.

“And it's a very working-class play. Alfie has had a hard life and not really a family life as such. He has grown up very much thinking that if you don't look after yourself, then no one else will look after you. He has got charm and he has got charisma but he feels that if you don't fight own corner, then people will **** on you from a great height. And that's why every time he finds he is starting to care about someone, he starts to feel vulnerable and ups sticks and moves on. Rather than risking getting hurt, he just drops them. And I think that's actually quite sad. But then he finds that he does get involved. This girl gets pregnant. And he finds that he does actually care about the child but that is actually uncomfortable for him. The women come and go throughout the play, all these different women but he always moves on as soon as he starts to get attached. If you judge him by our attitudes now in the 21st century you would have to say that he treats these women appallingly. He talks about them as it or she, not by name and when we did the read-through everyone was saying that he is just so awful and so nasty but as I say I just think he is sad. And I think you've got judge him by the era in which he was living. So many things are being revived and challenged according to our own attitudes now but I think you have just got to see him as a product of the time.

“But it is not a sad play, and it is certainly a great play for the actor playing Alfie. He has lots of monologues. Maybe every ten pages he breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to the audience about what he feels about life in general. We've got Ben Cassan playing Alfie. It's a play that requires a good actor, in fact a really good actor in the part and that's exactly what Ben is.”