A local theatre group is set to stage a play with music in a way that has not been possible for more than 50 years.

Thanks to painstaking research the group, Monmouth’s Off Centre Theatre, has unearthed the original score for “The Entertainer” by John Osborne, a leading modern British playwright. Osborne wrote the songs and Oscar-winning composer John Addison set them to music, also providing overtures and incidental music for a band in authentic music hall style.

When Monmouth’s Off Centre Theatre director, Martin Newman, secured a license to stage the play he was expecting to receive a copy of the full band score. Instead, he received a scanned copy of the piano part alone. It transpired that the full score had been lost and since then most performances could only include a piano.

Meticulous research in the UK proved fruitless buteventually the local production team traced part of the composer’s own papers to the library of a Mormon college in the Brigham Young University in Utah.

A team at the university, led by Dr David Day, unearthed a long unopened box labelled ‘The Entertainer’ which miraculously contained 122 pages of manuscript which passed on to the Monmouth theatre group’s production team.

What followed has been a complicated process, retrieving the real score from the sketchy, faded manuscript pages but it is now in usable form thanks to the skill of the production’s musical director, Ian Russell, himself a former principal with theWNO Orchestra.

As well as an experienced cast, younger performers and a dance troupe, the production will feature a live band playing the authentic music, probably for the first time in more than half a century. Off Centre Theatre’s production of The Entertainer is at the Savoy Theatre, Monmouth, for three nights on Thursday 19, Friday 20 and Saturday 21 June, all at 7.30pm. Tickets are available now from the theatre using this link: www.monmouth-savoy.co.uk