Pip Utton

Big Ben chimes and strikes 13; a magical time when once a year for just over an hour the statues of the great statesmen in Parliament Square, London, England, come alive again. Winston Churchill descends from his plinth to indulge himself in three of his greatest pleasures: a glass of Scotch, a cigar and listening to himself talk.

He talks of his childhood, his parents, his education, his army life, his marriage, his painting, writing and bricklaying, his appetites and, of course, he talks of his many years at the centre of the world political stage especially during two world wars.

Pip Utton's play is not an attempt to decide on Churchill's greatness. It is not an attempt to judge. It is just 70 minutes spent in the entertaining company of the man whose life spanned two centuries and saw the decline of the British Empire. The man who spent 50 years at the heart of political life in Westminster. The man who held most of the high offices of State, who was Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland twice, whose paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1953, who in 1963 was made the first honorary citizen of the United States, and who in 2002, in a BBC poll, was voted the Greatest Briton in History.