My Place

Elaine Dundy's follow-up to the immensely successful novel The Dud Avocado was a now-little-known play, My Place, first performed in 1962. Set in the dressing room of an actress who doesn't have a place of her own to live, My Place, according to journalist Bernard Levin, is "as cynical, hip, beat, amoral and generally with-it as could be." Author Clancy Sigal wrote, "The best and most lasting thing about Miss Dundy's play is her depiction of a new race of working-class, provincial, free-living and insecure actors, without traditions or education and needing and resisting both. These are tough, poignant young people, wanting to be themselves but desperately afraid of being phonied up if anyone official, or anything systematic, touches them. In this sense they are symptomatic of that whole social class of 'new wave' young English people. We envy their groping and their embattled pride."