A theatre in the Lake District is to be renamed for the comedian and playwright Victoria Wood and will stage a new musical using her songs to mark the 10th anniversary of her death.
The Old Laundry theatre is run by Wood’s friends, the married couple Charlotte Scott and Roger Glossop. Wood, who died from cancer aged 62 in 2016, was a trustee of the theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and performed there many times, also directing a revival of her play Talent there in 2008. Scott and Glossop got to know her when they worked on Talent’s premiere at the Sheffield Crucible in 1978.
The Old Laundry shares a building with the World of Beatrix Potter Attraction, which Wood officially opened, and in 2013 the theatre staged an adaptation of her TV drama Housewife 49, based on the diaries of a woman from Barrow-in-Furness during the second world war.
Wood wrote the plays Talent and Good Fun (1980) before becoming a household name and one of the country’s best-loved comedians with her songs and sketches, alongside actors including Julie Walters and Celia Imrie on television. When the Old Laundry becomes the Victoria Wood theatre next year it will stage a new musical, Fourteen Again, featuring numbers from Lucky Bag, her published collection of songs. The musical has a book by Tom MacRae, the writer and lyricist of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. MacRae worked with Wood on his 2015 TV version of the children’s book Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs, which featured Wood in one of her last TV roles.
Fourteen Again runs from 1 May and has a gala night on Wood’s birthday, 19 May. The Victoria Wood theatre will be one of the country’s few playhouses named after a female creative. In 2018 the New London theatre in the West End was renamed the Gillian Lynne theatre in honour of the Cats choreographer.
Two years ago, a new playwriting prize dedicated to comedy was launched in honour of Wood on what would have been her 70th birthday. The Victoria Wood playwriting prize for comedy was conceived in partnership with The Victoria Wood Foundation, whose trustees include Scott and Glossop. The inaugural award, supported by BBC Comedy, went to Eugene O’Hare in 2024 for his play Portugal.
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