Fry was cast in Simon Gray's "The Common Pursuit" for its first staging in London's West End on 7 April 1988, with Rik Mayall, John Sessions, Sarah Berger, Paul Mooney and John Gordon Sinclair, directed by Simon Gray. He was also cast in a lead role in Simon Gray's 1995 play "Cell Mates", which he left three days into the West End run, pleading stage fright. He later recalled the incident as a hypomanic episode in his documentary about bipolar disorder, "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive". In 2007, Fry wrote a Christmas pantomime, "Cinderella", which ran at London's Old Vic Theatre.