Play.
Doug Lucie By the author of Progress and Hard Feelings: this play opened to critical acclaim at the RSC's The Other Place in April 1987, transferring to The Pit, London, in the same year. It starred Brian Cox as Cash, the successful advertising agent in Thatcherite Britain trying to land theTory Party account. Comedy. 2 men, 2 women (flexible casting). Unit set After their plane crashes, Phyllis, and her son, Bishop, are stranded
on a desert island for five years. During their stay, Bishop is transformed
from a stuttering, Katherine Hepburn-obsessed little boy, in to a
feral savage who eventually rapes his mother. Phyllis devolves from
a glib, callused sophisticate to a helpless, addled shell. Left to
fend for themselves, they dine on the bodies of those less fortunate
and eventually become lovers. At home, we see Howard, Phyllis' husband
and famous movie director, continuing life with his somewhat loopy,
ex-pornstar mistress, Pam. Pam moves in with Howard and becomes pregnant.
In Act Two, Bishop and Phyllis return to civilization, but their
savage lifestyle is not easily shed. All four characters live together,
walking on eggshells around Bishop, who now is barbarous beyond reason
and has amassed an incredible shoe collection to impress his mother.
Pam is reduced to pretending she is the domestic help and is rapidly
growing tired of it. Howard is too burdened with guilt to act on
anyone's behalf. Phyllis reaches out to Pam and confides that she
and Bishop are lovers, but before Pam can convey this to Howard,
she is killed by Bishop, who proceeds to eat her. When Howard discovers
this, he too pays the price and becomes dinner for Bishop and Phyllis.
In Act Three, Bishop is being treated in a hospital for the criminally
insane. He is haunted by his mother's ghost and pursued by a demonically
cheerful fellow inmate. He refuses to accept what the doctors know
to be true, that he killed Phyllis. Finally; as the walls between
past and present break down in Bishop's mind, he confesses to his
matricide. We see the scene where Phyllis asks Bishop to murder her.
Bishop remembers his mother's recurring dream about a three-hundred-pound
transvestite. This monstrosity multiplied in her dreams and became
several fat men in skirts, in cages. It is the acceptance of this
memory, that may allow Bishop to heal, moving forward and understanding
the relationship between love and harm. Thriller. Bernard Slade Blair is a famous actress about to be divorced from her second husband
Morgan who has called at Blair's hideaway Nantucket beach-house to
collect some of his paintings. A second visitor is Tony Lombardi,
a photo journalist who has dogged Blair for fifteen years and whom
she has sued for harassment. His obsession with Blair certainly goes
beyond professional interest but what motive does he have for murdering
Morgan? Tragedy 3 Acts. August Strindberg. Freely adapted by Oliver Haíley. 5 men, 3 women. Interior. One of Strindbergs most famous works, the play deals with a brilliant
but erratic military officer and scientist who clashes with his wife
on the question of whether their daughter should be sent away for
her schooling or kept at home. A renowned misogynist, Strindberg
used the play to dramatise what he considered to be the weaknesses
and failings of women, and the diabolical way in which they sought
to poison the hearts and minds of the men who had the misfortune
to love them. But while Strindberg's view of the female set may have
been somewhat lopsided, in the present adaptation the mother - her
thoughts, and feelings, and aspirations - is given equal attention.
While the laws of the time gave a father unreasonable control over
his children and the mother was forced to use her wiles to fight
against this, the-present version makes it clear that this was not
always done with the sinister reasons in mind which Strindberg ascribed.
Here the father and the mother are given equal voice - making, at
last, for a fair fight, and conveying a heightened theatricality
which brings added power to one of the modern theatre's truly great
plays. Tragedy 3 Acts. August Strindberg, translated by Michael Meyer. 5 men, 3 women. Unit Set. A vicious and cunning Swedish bourgeois wife, Laura, sets out to
wrest control over the upbringing of her daughter from her husband,
the amiable Capt. Adolph. By planting in the Captain's mind the notion
that he is not the child's father and by deft innuendo amongst their
mutual friends and relations, Laura goads her husband into a display
of violent temper in order to justify her accusation that he is insane.
With the help of a credulous doctor and an old and trusted family
nurse, she inveigles the Captain into a straitjacket. Thus restrained
and overwhelmed by her betrayal, the Captain suffers a stroke and
Laura wins sole control over their daughter. The intensity of the
relations between husband and wife is so narrowly the focus of the
play's action that it may be set in any typical bourgeois home. Play. August Strindberg. Adapted by John
Osborne John Osborne's adaptation of Strindberg's portrayal of the battle of the sexes presents a moving, incisive examination of marriage and parenthood. The Captain and his wife Laura struggle over the heart and mind of their only daughter, until Laura decides that she must completely destroy her husband in order to raise her child according to her own wishes. ' ... a scathing adaptation by John Osborne ... a natural Strindbergian for our times.' Punch. Period late nineteenth century Play. Mary Gallagher. 2 men, 2 women. Unit set Described by the author as "the waking and sleeping dreams of Paul
Hogan, the son, on a Sunday afternoon," the play is comprised of
flashbacks and fantasies which illuminate the steady disintegration
of a family dogged by the father's growing madness. A failed lawyer,
desperately trying to maintain appearances with Irish braggadocio,
the father withdraws steadily from reality, leaving his wife and
children impoverished and embittered. The action takes place largely
in the mind of the son, Paul, as he drifts in and out of sleep, while
debating whether to visit his father in the institution where he
has been confined. Memories are interspersed with interludes of vaudeville
humor, where past and present are distorted into scenes of wild,
cartoon-like fantasy. But guilt - and terror - cannot be laughed
away and, as the line between sanity and madness grows thinner, we
are made movingly aware that the son, while fighting to avoid the
fate of his father, may, inevitably, come to share it. Comedy. Oliver Hailey. 3 men, 3 women. Exterior Left with their alimony, their children, and neighbouring apartments
on New York's posh upper East Side, three divorcees share their loneliness,
their often hilarious thoughts on sex and marriage, and their bitter
memories of lost trust and closeness. When their ex-husbands arrive
for a Father's Day reunion they are all, at first, as civilized and
sophisticated as the situation demands - but then the veneer begins
to crack, and beneath the fusillade of funny lines their aching emptiness,
and hurt, show through. In the end they face the truth about themselves
and the rejection which they must accept, as the biting humour of
the play gives way to a moment of touching, revealing, yet quietly
shattering resignation. Father Uxbridge Wants To Marry Play Frank Gagliano. 3 men, 4 women, 1 girl (non-speaking role). Area Staging. The story begins on an elevator, where the operator is about to
lose his job through automation and is appealing to his passenger,
who happens to own the apartment house where he is employed. It then
turns to his memories, which are chiefly preoccupied with his mother,
his wife, the women he is living with after the marital split-up
and his mute daughter, until he starts thinking of the two priests
who are important to him. Father Uxbridge is actually the less important
of the pair, a somewhat casual cleric who believes the celibacy of
the clergy will soon be a thing of the past. But Father Ongar is
a much more dynamic figure. He is really a sardonic, darkly Satanic
type, who sees no mercy nor love-kindness in God, no goodness in
mankind. It is he, with his savage bitterness, who has the important
influence over the mind and soul of the troubled, simple-minded elevator
operator. And it is an influence which, unhappily, fails to provide
the solace and guidance so needed to achieve purposeful understanding
of this world and resigned acceptance of the next. So the "little
man: is crucified in the name of the modern humanity-defiant in the
face of forces he cannot comprehend, but powerless to avert their
pernicious control of his destiny. Play. Brian Friel from the original
novel by Ivan Turgenev Adapted from Turgenev's socio-political novel of rural Russia of the mid-nineteenth century, this passionate and powerful play's central topic is the confrontation of the old and the young, of liberals and radicals, romanticism and revolution. |