Get Me the Urgent Biscuits: An Assistant’s Adventures in Theatreland

At 18, after moving to London with dreams of becoming an actress, an impressionable girl who paints freckles on her face begins work experience in a West End theatre company. In between mail-outs and making cups of coffee she meets the formidable producer Thelma Holt. Within a fortnight Thelma has stolen her, cancelled her audition for RADA, sent her to evening classes to learn to type, organised a miniscule salary and renamed her. From that moment on she becomes Sweetpea. This is a keenly observed memoir about the vanishing world of London’s West End in the 1980s and 1990s, in which a young woman is swept into the orbit of a theatrical impresario.