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Play. John Wynne-Tyson This sophisticated, revealing comedy supposes a middle-age reunion in Las Vegas between Noel Coward and Esmé Wynne-Tyson, his real-life, oldest, closest and most exacting female friend. Although entirely imaginary, it is based on special knowledge and offers a character assessment of two very real, remarkable people. Period 1950s. 'I enjoyed fit] hugely. You have caught Noel completely -the whole man.' Richard Briers. 'Terribly clever ... so convincing ... a brilliant play, extremely amusing and often touching.' Dodie Smith Scott McPherson : Drama 5M 4F Flexible staging This is a dark yet hilarious account of one woman's commitment to
loving others first, in spite of her own personal struggles. Bessie
lives in Florida where she cares for her aunt and ailing father,
Marvin. Aunt Ruth has several collapsed vertebrae and has to wear
an electrode pack on her waist with which she can both control her
constant pain and open and close her garage door at will. Unable
to speak, and confined to his bed for years Marvin's only entertainment
comes from someone bouncing beams of sunlight around his room, reflected
from a small mirror. Bessie learns amidst all this illness that she
has leukemia and that her only hope is to contact her long-estranged
sister Lee to see if her bone marrow is compatible for a transplant.
Lee reluctantly makes the trip to Florida from Ohio, bringing along
her two sons, one of whom has just been released from an institution
after a wave of arson. The reunion of the sisters is uneasy at best,
with long buried recriminations coming to the surface even as love
slowly overwhelms Lee's veneer of selfishness and glib denial. Bessie's
challenge becomes to reunite Lee and her son Hank before he rejects
her forever for her years of neglect. One by one, Lee and her sons
are tested for the transplant, but none of them will be able to donate
to Bessie who, for the moment, seems to have gone into remission.
Against Lee's urging that Bessie take it easy, Bessie refuses to
condemn Aunt Ruth and her father to nursing homes, claiming that
only by caring for them herself will she make her own illness bearable.
During a trip to Disneyland, Bessie collapses. Lee and Hank, however,
have finally begun to communicate as a result of Bessie's attentions
to them both. As the bad news accumulates, the play ends with Bessie
taking shelter in her only refuge: in answer to her father's cries
of discomfort, she selflessly abandons her own despair and helps
him to bounce the days remaining sunlight around his room. Freidrich Schiller. Trans. and adapted by Jeremy Sams 'Schiller's Mary Stuart, one of the greatest of all romantic
tragedies, is the tale of two queens separated by historic identity
but joined in their dramatic isolation' Observer. Mary Queen
of Scots has been held prisoner for nineteen years by her cousin,
Elizabeth I, who has condemned her to death, but is reluctant to
be seen to carry out the sentence. Leicester, Elizabeth's favourite
and Mary's ex-lover, engineers a meeting of the two Queens - an encounter
which never took place in historical fact - from which Mary emerges
triumphant but doomed. 'Jeremy Sams's succinct and sharp new adaptation
gives it all a telling urgency' Daily Mail. Premiered at
the National in 1996 with Anna Massey as Elizabeth and Isabelle Huppert
as Mary. Comedy. Jean Kerr. 3 men, 2 women. Interior As Howard Taubman of the New York Times describes: "You will not
be overwhelmed to discover that Mary is contrary and that her trouble
is basic insecurity. Seems she had an older sister, a stunner. Oh,
the traumatic effect on Mary! In high school she went out for the
literary monthly instead of with boys. She learned to compensate
for her drabness by being clever. When we meet her, she is as witty
as - well, Jean Kerr. She appears at the apartment of her former
husband, Bob, because his lawyer has summoned her to help with Bob's
sticky tax returns. Their marriage, it seems, foundered on the rocks
of Mary's unrelenting sense of humor. The moment she arrives she
gives us some excellent samples of it. It takes Dirk Winston, a handsome
film hero whose star is in decline, to understand Mary. Dirk makes
her face up to her secret. He also kisses her and offers her the
kind of adoration her practical and obtuse husband has been unable
to manage. Just in time, Bob, who has been on the verge of marrying
a rich, young health fiend named Tiffany Richards, realizes that
he still needs Mary. It will not be killing any suspense to reveal
that true love triumphs." Mary
Stuart A conflict raged for 20 years between Elizabeth of England and Mary Stuart, during which the destiny of England as an independent nation of free people trembled in the balance. Elizabeth struggles over whether to keep her cousin Mary alive or to execute her. Each course stems to be of equal peril. The play is by turns a testament to human bravery and personal dignity; a conflict between personal and political responsibility; a struggle between womanhood and statesmanship, where Mary triumphs at one and Elizabeth the other. Play. Hugh Leonard Sherlock Holmes' arch-enemy Moriarty must be captured before he can seize the plans for a topsecret scientific device; Holmes must also find out who murdered the maid of beautiful Gwen Mellors, before Gwen's half-brother is arrested for the crime. Meanwhile Moriarty, transformed by plastic surgery to resemble Sherlock Holmes, is given the plans by an unsuspecting messenger. A comedy-thriller, full of quirky characters, ludicrous deductions and absurd situations. Play. Adapted by Stephen Briggs from the novel by Terry Pratchett All is not well in the Ankh-Morpork Opera House. A ghost stalks
the dark corridors, leaving strange letters for the management and
... killing people. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, two Lancre witches,
investigate, and are soon involved in all kinds of skulduggery, mayhem
and ear-splittingly loud singing. Quirky and original characters,
a labyrinthine plot and numerous witty one-liners make this a treat
for Discworld fans and 'uninitiated' theatregoers alike. Play: Bill C. Davis : 2 men. Unit Set Father Tim Farley, a lover of the good things in life, is comfortably
ensconced as priest of a prosperous Catholic congregation. Without
realizing it, he has resorted to flattering his parishioners and
entertaining them with sermons that skirt any disturbing issues,
in order to protect his Mercedes, his trips abroad and the generous
supply of fine wines which grace his table (and his desk drawer).
His well ordered world is disrupted by the arrival of Mark Dolson,
an intense and idealistic young seminarian whom Father Farley reluctantly
agrees to take under his wing. There is immediate conflict between
the two as the younger man challenges the older priest's sybaritic
ways, while Father Farley is appalled by Marks confession that he
had led a life of bisexual promiscuity before entering the priesthood.
In the final essence their confrontation is a touching yet very funny
examination of the nature of friendship, courage and the infinite
variety of love, as the older man is reminded of the firebrand he
once was, and the younger comes to realize that forbearance is as
vital to the Christian ethic as righteousness. Play. Michael Wilcox Tony Dodge hires Rikki from a massage agency to help him celebrate a child's birthday tea. The absent child in question-for whom Dodge has more than a tender affection- is Simon, twelveyear-old son of Dodge's former girlfriend Jane. Rikki, though a rent boy, is heterosexual with his own childhood memories of sexual abuse. Gradually, under his sharp questioning, the complex nature of Dodge's dilemma is revealed: what began as innocent paternal friendship for a child has developed into a great deal more. Master and Margarita or The Devil Comes To Moscow Drama. Jean-Claude van Itallie, from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. 11 men, 2 women (flexible casting). Unit Set. The devil, his acrobatic cat and other colourful cronies come to
Stalin's Moscow to wreak hilarious surreal havoc on the lives of
writers, critics and bureaucratniks who have lost touch with their
feelings. Satan sends some to the madhouse, stages a devilish play
within a play, and gives the lyrical Margarita a whirlwind witch's
ride climaxing in a satanic masked ball as she searches for her lover,
a writer known as "Master." The novel Master is writing appears simultaneously
on stage. His work, politically suppressed, focuses on the moral
dilemma of Pontius Pilate in biblical Jerusalem. The characters in
his book and the characters on the streets of Moscow, cast similar
lights and shadows around them even as they live in separate worlds. Henrik Ibsen, Trans K.McLeish One of Ibsen's later plays (1893). Solness, the master builder of
the tide, is a self-made and successful businessman. He has stopped
building the churches and towers of his youth in order to concentrate
on ordinary houses for people, ever since the house his wife inherited
burnt down with their own children inside. His guilty feelings of
worthlessness spur him into absurd power struggles in his office,
but he is forced to face his guilt when the provocative Hilde arrives
with her story from the past. Tragedy 3 Acts. Henrik Ibsen, translated by Michael Meyer. 4 men, 3 women. Unit Set In late nineteenth-century Norway, middle-aged master architect
Halvard Solness fears his talented young assistant Ragnar will leave
his employ and usurp him, so he pretends affection to his clerk Kaia
who is engaged to Ragner but infatuated with Solness. If Kaia stays,
figures Solness, so will Ragnar. Then twentythree-year-old Hilda
Wangel appears; she met Solness ten years ago and saw him climb to
the top of the last great tower he built and ever since has worshipped
him - now, she is ready to be his `princess'. Solness tells her his
prosperity comes not from towers but from houses, which he began
building when his wife Aline's house and all their possessions were
destroyed by fire. Later his twin sons died and guilt-ridden Solness
feels his success has been achieved at the cost of his wife's fulfilment
as a mother. Aline herself tells Hilda her sufferings area punishment
from God for loving her precious dolls (which were destroyed in the
fire) more than her children. Solness has built a new house with
a tower for himself and Aline, and Hilda, after persuading him to
release Ragnar, wants him to climb the tower and crown it with a
laurel wreath. He reveals he suffers from vertigo, but cannot resist
Hilda's youth and her faith in him. He climbs, reaches the top, then
falls to his death. Drama. Terrence McNally : 1996 Maria Callas is teaching a master class in front of an audience (us). She's glamorous, commanding, larger than life - and drop-dead funny. An accompanist sits at the piano. Callas's first "victim" is Sophie, a ridiculous, overly perky soprano, dressed all in. pink. Sophie chooses to sing one of the most difficult arias, the sleepwalking scene from La Somnambula - an aria which Callas made famous. Before the girl sings a note, Callas stops her - she clearly can't stand hearing music massacred. And now what once was a class has become a platform for Callas. She glories in her own career, dabbles in opera dish, and flat-out seduces the audience. Callas gets on her knees and acts the entire aria in dumb show, eventually reducing the poor singer to tears. But with that there are plenty of laughs going on, especially between Callas and the audience. Callas pulls back and gives Sophie a chance to use what she's learned. Though as soon as Sophie starts singing, Callas mentally leaves the room and goes into a sprawling interior monologue about her own performance of that aria and the thunderous applause she received at La Scala. Callas wakes up and sends Sophie off with a pat. The next two sessions repeat the same dynamic, only the middle session is with a tenor who moves Callas to teas. She again enters her memories and we learn about Callas's affair with Aristotle Onassis; an abortion she was forced to have; her first, elderly husband whom she left; her early days as an ugly duckling; the fierce hatred of her rivals; and the unforgiving press that savaged her at first. Finally, we meet Sharon, another soprano, who arrives in a full ball gown. With Sharon singing, Callas is genuinely moved, for the young singer has talent, but Callas tells her to stick to flimsy roles. Sharon is devastated and spits back every nasty thing you've ever heard about Callas: she's old, washed up, she ruined her voice too early in her career, she only wants people to worship her, etc. Sharon rushes out of the hall and Callas brings the class to a close with a beautiful speech about the sacrifices we must make in the name of art. Play. Arthur Bicknell. 3 men, 4 women. Unit Set The story is an imaginative reconstruction of the lives of Branwell
Brontë and his sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. An unconventional
historic drama, it utilises humour and fantasy sequences to illuminate
the tragic fare of the lesser known Brontë
heir, Patrick Branwell - the one for whom the family held the greatest
expectations. Its theme ' touches upon a subject common to many -
the fear of anonymity. While other children their age occupied themselves
outdoors, the four Brontës were sequestered in their father's
parsonage, scribbling away in tiny notebooks, creating the imaginary
world of Angria."
It was Branwell that presided over this world, inspiring the others
to create characters that would one day reappear as the protagonists
of his sisters' novels, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall and Jane Eyre. All of the Brontes' short lives were shrouded
in anonymity. Emily was the least bothered by this fact; Charlotte
and Anne were distressed but not thwarted, and continued their literary
output. Only Branwell, the painter, was unable to reconcile himself
to a life without focus or commitment. In desperation he turned to
erotic fantasies involving his patron, the beautiful Lady Lydia Robinson.
The mysterious circumstances connected with Branwell's involvement
with this woman, including his sudden dismissal from her estate,
shed light on the sad facts of his untimely death, and the. descent
into drugs and drink which preceded it. |