Hugh Hastings

Actor and playwright Hugh Hastings wrote one of the British theatre's most successful post-war comedies, Seagulls Over Sorrento, which opened in London in 1950 and ran for 1551 performances. The play subsequently became staple fare for repertory companies throughout the world and was filmed in 1954 with Gene Kelly in the leading role. Seagulls Over Sorrento was a British service comedy that had an all-male cast. Five naval ratings volunteer for a special posting on a naval experimental base on a remote island off Scapa Flow. The work of the base is so secret that they themselves are not told what it is, but they are warned that it is highly dangerous. The London impresario Binkie Beaumont staged the original play and cast the production himself. The cockney actor Ronald Shiner played the lead alongside Bernard Lee, William Hartnell, Nigel Stock, John Gregson and David Langton. A Broadway production opened in 1955 with Rod Steiger and Leslie Neilson and in the same year a young Harold Pinter appeared in a repertory production in Colchester. John Osborne recalled in his autobiography that he wrote Look Back In Anger while appearing on Morecambe Pier in Seagulls Over Sorrento in 1955. Hastings wrote several other plays and a less than successful musical version of Seagulls Over Sorrento entitled Scapa! (1962) and in the early 1970s teamed up with Dad's Army actor Bill Pertwee to appear in cabaret. For several years Hastings had been cast as one of the back row platoon in BBC's Dad's Army.