WHEN Bob Eaton first started working on the show, Lennon, it was just months after Liverpool’s most famous musical son had been shot outside his apartment building in New York.

The world was still in shock and the play acted as, the writer says, a memorial to the late Beatle.

Reworking it for a month-long run at the Royal Court, to mark 30 years since John Lennon’s death, has been an interesting experience, says Eaton. But not simply because of the three-decade gap.

“The whole idea of doing the show back then was a reaction to the fact that he’d been killed.

“It is different this time, not only because his death is not so fresh for us, but because now a lot more information is known about his life.”

One example Eaton gives is the reason for Lennon’s so-called “lost weekend” – the 18 months spanning 1973-74 he spent with lover May Pang, away from his wife Yoko Ono. “I met Yoko about five years ago in New York, when I was working on a Broadway show, and she told me the story of what happened,” he says.

The couple were at a party on the night of US President Richard Nixon’s re-election, he relates.

“John pulled a woman into the bedroom and all the other guests could hear what was going on, but nobody could leave because all their coats were on the bed inside the room.