The King and I is Eastbourne pre-Christmas treat

“The thing about The King and I is that you have got to go to the source which is the fact that Rodgers and Hammerstein were always looking to push the boundaries of musical theatre and bring up subjects that were unusual, that were a little bit more epic and dealt with rather more complex stories. I believe it was Gertrude Lawrence who gave the book (the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam) to Hammerstein and said she wanted to do it. Around the same time there was a movie made with Rex Harrison starring as the King and he was very, very good.

“But the central struggle in the piece is between tradition and modernity. You have a king who is trying to struggle with traditional culture in a modern world with all its difficulties and anxieties and problems – just all the difficulties of modernising his culture. He has a very traditional Buddhist culture and he's got a patrilineal culture and he's also faced with the pressures of colonialism. So you've got this great struggle on a personal and political level and then he meets Anna Leonowens and they start to build a relationship… And I think people respond to the show now because they can see in their own world the challenge of tradition against modernity, of our culture changing, of the different pressures, and I think that's why it does strike a chord. When we first did it, it was a very strong pulling together of many cultures and that's what makes it so powerful and it allows audiences to go back at the same time to explore this world of Thailand in the mid-20th century.

“In a way at the start there is something of a teacher-student relationship between them. It is people from opposite places coming together and there's just a hint of a little layer of romance between then, a connection between the King and Anna as they solve problems together and try to work together, and I do think that's powerful.

“(The show in Eastbourne) is the production that we did here at the Lincoln Center eight years ago and the approach was that if you look at the 50s versions you see something very ornamental and decorative in the view of Thailand but what we wanted to do was to make something that was a bit more pure and that related to the people without the decorated surface. It has since toured all over the place. It was in Broadway for about a year and a half. Darren Lee (who plays the King in the UK tour) has been with the production for a long time, and now for the tour I think Helen George (best known as Trixie in the hit BBC One series Call The Midwife) brings intelligence and heart and in all honesty a little bit of extreme gracefulness.”

New York-based Bartlett is looking forward catching up with the show in Eastbourne: “The response has been extraordinary everywhere we have gone. We had a great time in the West End and that's why we wanted to go back. It was in the West End in 2019.”