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Play. Rony Robinson This wry romantic comedy was commissioned for the 1998 BT Biennial.
Max narrates, in Act I, in reverse from his surprise birthday party
in June back to the previous Christmas. In Act II Kate tells her
story from Christmas to June. Kate feels under-appreciated by Max
and leaves to start a theatre studies course. Her father Daniel moves
in with his son-in-law because he cannot bear his wife Jenny any
longer, whilst Jenny moves in with Kate, considering herself to be
a widow. It's mayhem all round ... Play. Harold Pinter. 4 men. Involves the confrontation of two aging writers, one a success,
one not. They meet at the comfortable flat of the successful author
for a nightcap, even though it is not clearly apparent that they
are previously acquainted, and the failed, seedy writer is soon forced
to acknowledge that he now works as an attendant in a pub. The rich
author, Hirst, having drunk too much, is put to bed by the two rather
sinister servant-bodyguardswho attend him, and his guest, Spooner,
is left alone-with the door locked. In the morning the mood changes.
Spooner is served a lavish breakfast, and then a rejuvenated Hirst
bursts in, greeting Spooner as though he were a dear old school chum,
and the sharer of many past escapades. Spooner plays along, and there
is the sudden hope that he will be able to secure their relationship
to his personal benefit. But Hirst can only acknowledge the cold
around him, and order the curtains drawn, before slipping irretrievably
into that place which never changes - the icy, silent no man's land,
where past and present merge into eternity. No More Sitting on the Old School Bench Play. Alan Bleasdale A serious comedy vividly portraying the staff of a multi-racial comprehensive school regrouping for the autumn term and facing two problems: the redeployment of two members and the arrival of an earnest middle-aged novice teacher who tries hard to ingratiate himself with staff and pupils alike. ' ... tart, painfully astringent drama that dares us not to laugh.' Plays and Players Play. Martin Crimp Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1990, Martin Crimp's examination of the world of market research starred Celia Imrie. Liz, recently deserted by her writer husband, is accosted in the street and quizzed about frozen pizzas. Reluctant at first and then resentful, Liz finds herself persuaded to take part in an intensive video-recorded interview with market-research executive Colin, and it isn't long before he offers Liz a job herself. Farce. Anthony Marriott and Bob Grant Dr Garfeld arrives at the somewhat seedy Lawns Hotel in the hope
of spending an enjoyable, if discreet, visit with his attractive
receptionist, Michele. Unfortunately his wife is the harpist in an
orchestra also visiting the hotel, which makes his excuse of a golfing
excursion difficult to sustain. Further, the hotel's poor room registration
system results in a wild confusion of mistaken identities, furious
confrontations and hectic misunderstandings. No Sex Please - We're British! Comedy. Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot This riotous comic farce notched up a staggeringly successful sixteen
year run in the West End! Peter and Frances could reasonably expect
to look forward to a calm, happy start to their married life together.
Owing to an unfortunate mistake, however, they find themselves inundated
with pornographic material from the 'Scandinavian Import Company'.
Senior bank officials, Peter's snobbish mother, and a prim, respectable
bank cashier become inextricably entangled in the rumbustious events
that follow. Comedy. Duncan Greenwood and Robert King The women are running the world. An atomic accident has resulted
in the disappearance of all men. All, that is, but two who were protected
in an underground shelter. The women keep these potential super mates
under close guard but, spurred on by the thought of a whole world
of desirable women at their disposal, the men try to escape. Comedy. W. Somerset Maugham. Adapted from the French of Grenet-Dancourt A grandee of Spain falls in love with a young English widow on holiday with her friends. His persistence causes countless crises and mistaken identities in which everyone becomes involved and everyone is compromised. The dialogue is as light and crisp as the emotions of the characters themselves and with humour as dry as only Somerset Maugham's salt wit could make it. Period 1850 Comedy: Ronald Alexander. The central character is a producer and writer of television serials,
except that he doesn't really write any serials, they're written
by frost-bitten minions he keeps in closets. And he really doesn't
produce anything either, he just keeps dancing around his living
room pretending to be as many other people as possible. Sometimes
he is Toulouse Lautrec, popping stubby-kneed from his hiding-place
behind the black leather furniture, sometimes he is Michelangelo,
bestowing a kiss upon himself in the mirror, sometimes he is Father
Christmas, sometimes he is Jack the Ripper, and always he is Ananias,
the man who cannot tell a lie. 'This is my art form!' He coos in
loving self-congratulation as he opens his arms to embrace the ersatz
universe he has spun out of whole cloth, a universe in which busy
people come and go to listen to his quick and glossy fabrications
before interrupting him to articulate theirs. Included in this amazing
array of visiting frauds are the hard-driving studio owner who delights
in brow-beating the creative souls beholden to her; a calculating
lady comedy writer whose contempt for her nationwide audience is
matched only by her shrewdness in pleasing them; and a conniving
agent forever on the lookout for another victim to corrupt. Circling
about them are a quaking ghost writer and our hero's private secretary
- two innocently honest souls trapped in a nest of vipers. Alex Jones Becky and Dan are teenage newlyweds expecting their first child.
With their new housing association flat and with Dan's new job, life
seems full of promise, until one night techno music begins to blast
through the wall. As the strain of the noise increases, the hope
for good things to come falls away, and they finally come face to
face with their noisy neighbour Matt, in 'Alex Jones's strong, distressing
play' The Times. Premiered Soho Theatre, 1997. Comedy. Michael Frayn This clever, smash-hit farce won numerous awards. 'The play opens
with a touring company dress rehearsing Nothing On, a conventional
farce. Mixing mockery and homage, Frayn heaps into this play-within-a-play
a hilarious mêlée of stock characters and situations.
Caricatures cheeky char, outraged wife and squeaky blonde - stampede
in and out of doors. Voices rise and trousers fall ... a farce that
makes you think as well as laugh.' Times Literary Supplement Play. Larry Kramer Set in New York in the early 1980s, this powerful, passionate and controversial play was the first to treat seriously the poignant and awesome subject of AIDS, following a writer's struggle to break through indifference and hypocrisy surrounding the killer disease and his attempt to draw attention to the plight of the gay community in contemporary America. After a successful New York run, the play was acclaimed in London at the Royal Court Theatre with Martin Sheen in the central role. Three plays. Alan Ayckbourn Table Manners. M3 F3. A dining-room. . These three plays form a trilogy. They are not consecutive, but
all occur during a single weekend, and each takes place in the same
house, with the same cast of characters, set individually in two
of the rooms and the garden. Thus we are watching, at times, but
not all the time, events which are taking place simultaneously with
those we have seen (or about to see) in another set. Each play is
complete in itself and can be played as a separate entity. However
each benefits if all can be produced as one threefold whole. Play. Adapted by Matthew Francis from the novel by Jane Austen Matthew Francis's adaptation of Jane Austen's first novel wryly
dramatises Catherine Morland's romantic fantasy world alongside the
real one, and captures all Austen's irony and acerbic comment in
witty dialogue and narration. Period early 1800s Play Israel Horovitz. 2 men, 7 women. Interior Set in a fish packing plant in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the action
of the play centres on the daily routine of the workers, mostly women,
who have come to regard North Shore Fish as a way of life. But despite
the ribald humour, juicy gossip, and boisterous horseplay which enlivens
their working day, the women are aware that there are signs of impending
trouble. Once a thriving enterprise which processed the daily catch
of the local fishing fleet, the company is now reduced to repacking
frozen fish imported from Japan and the layoffs have already begun.
Despite the bravado of the philandering plant manager, who makes
a futile last ditch effort to keep the plant open by attempting to
persuade an officious lady health inspector to "look the other way," their
worst fears are realised when the manager concedes defeat and announces
that North Shore Fish will soon be replaced by a fitness centre.
The workers, like so many others across the nation whose jobs have
been lost to industrial obsolescence and foreign competition, are
shaken but not surprised and while they accept their fate stoically,
there is also a sense of helplessness and defeat which brings great
poignancy to the final moments of the play. These are good, spirited
people, whose hard work and dedication have come to nothing - and
they are powerless to do anything about it. Drama. Tom Donaghy. The story follows Mickey and Gi from their meeting in the late summer,
1963, until their parting thirty years later. He is a steel worker
who cannot foresee the approaching end of that industry. She, sensing
emerging possibilities for women, hopes soon to find her calling.
By the end of the first scene they have already conceived Stefan,
and over the next decades they will struggle to stay afloat as time
- and the times - move more quickly than either would have imagined.
Other influences in Mickey and Gi's lives are Jesse, who's moved
North from New Orleans to open a pastry shop, and Mickey's immigrant
mother, Mair, who finds so many things about her new world impossible
to accept. Northeast Local is an elegy for a certain time,
place, and class in America, as much as it is for the movement of
time itself. Simon Block : 3m. Black Comedy. Simple set. Three cabbies seek solace in table tennis, and tonight they must
win or face relegation from the local league. But the contest taking
place between the three of them is much more than a game. 'Block's
finest achievement ... is to show you how ridiculous these men are
... without belittling them or destroying your sympathy for them' Financial
Times. 'His writing is compassionate, observant and, as a bonus,
shot through with humour' Sunday Express. Premiered at the
Royal Court, 1995. Play. Stephen MacDonald The play 'shows the strangely fruitful encounter between Siegfried Sassoon, war hero and aristocrat, now obsessed with exposing every sham ideal used to justify war, and Wilfred Owen, recovering from the effects of neurasthenia attributable to shell-shock, looking desperately for a hero who was not immune to the pity of war.' Times Literary Supplement. Period 1917-18 Play. Tennessee Williams Written in 1938 and based on fact, the play follows the events of a prison scandal which shocked America when convicts leading a hunger strike were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. Its sympathetic treatment of a black character and of a transvestite may have kept the play suppressed and unproduced during its own time. But its flashes of lyricism and compelling dialogue presage the great later plays of Williams and shows young Williams as a political writer, passionate about social injustice. Ray Cooney and John Chapman : Farce 5M 6F Interior set The play is set in the elegant fur salon of Bodley, Bodley & Crouch.
Gilbert Bodley, a flamboyant extrovert, is scheming to seduce a beautiful
stripper, Janie with the aid of a £5,000 mink. Unfortunately,
she is married and her husband, Harry, would notice such an acquisition.
So Gilbert reduces the mink to £500 and Janie tries to get Harry
to buy the coat for her, Gilbert paying the difference. Harry realizes
a bargain when he sees one and buys it instead for his own curvaceous
little secretary, Sue. Gilbert is quite demented by this turn of
events and both he and his dithering assistant, Arnold Crouch, are
further embarrassed when Janie strips and refuses to leave the salon
without the mink. Their frenzied attempts to retrieve the coat from
Sue and hide the naked Janie are further complicated by the unexpected
arrival of Gilbert's wife, Maud. Meanwhile, Arnold's method of hiding
any discarded ladies underwear is to throw them out of the window
and it is left to Miss Tipdale, the firm's spinster secretary, to
retrieve the garments and the situation whenever necessary. The hilarious
permutations reach a point of hysteria before everyone gets their
just desserts. Play. Paul Kember This traces the effect of kibbutz life on four disillusioned volunteers
who arrive for a working holiday and find the work more like hard
labour. Two of the English, Pete and Dave, soon alienate themselves
by their foul-mouthed, high-spirited behaviour. The third, Carne,
nervous and lonely, desperately tries but cannot relate to either
her compatriots or the Israelis and it is left to Cambridge dropout
Mike to convey something of the frustration and impotence felt by
many of the young of modern England. Winner of the New Standard Most
Promising Playwright Award in 1980. Drama. Gen LeRoy. 1 man, 3 women. Unit set In a mental facility in New York, Gabby Stone, a quiet unassuming,
guiltwracked widow, has come to collect her daughter, Nicole, who
has been institutionalized for over a year following a suicide attempt.
Mother and daughter are a mismatched couple; Nicole, in a mild manic
state, is witty, brilliant, artistic, passionate and wildly courageous.
Gabby, sharing her worries with the audience, reads the worst into
the radical notions her daughter expounds, and is threatened by Nicole's
views on how Gabby's life must change. Obsession is the core of Nicole's
illness and the motor that drives her: from wanting to save Gabby,
to saving the world; to enjoying everything beautiful in life, to
deciding that the cat she long ago relinquished to her ex-husband
needs to be restored to her own safe keeping. Trying to gain order
in her life, Nicole drags a reluctant Gabby through a whirlwind of
adventures that include Karate lessons, demonstrations, lectures,
work at a Brooklyn Day Care Center, and finally to kidnapping Isabella,
Nicoles cat. While on this roller-coaster ride, Gabby begins to understand
the torment her daughter has been suffering and gradually becomes
an ally. They bond, but Nicole, in trying to fill the gaps in her
disoriented life, is eventually overwhelmed by her illness and her
thwarted plans. She heartbreakingly spirals down and once again must
be institutionalized. But she has left Gabby transformed A new woman,
Gabby is focused, fearless, empowered, formidable, the kind of mother
and friend Nicole will need when she once again emerges from the
hell-hole of mental illness. Play. Mike Harding When their wives join the Women's Peace Movement, Nobby, Tommy and
Ken, pals in the Territorial Army, treat it as a joke. But as the
women become more involved in demonstrations the men become the laughing
stock of their TA battalion. Finally, the women, attempting to make
their husbands give up the army, go on sexual strike with the slogan
'No Nooky Against the Nukes'. A wry, amusing look at the nuclear
disarmament issue set in the author's North of England. A free adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull.
Drama. Tennessee Williams. 7 men, 6 women. Unit Set On his Uncle Soriris
lakeside estate, Constantine's new play premieres to disdainful reactions
from the family and friends who have gathered: Masha; her future husband
Medvedenko; Dorn, a lecherous doctor; Shamrayev, manager of the estate;
and his wife Polina. Constantine's mother, the famous actress Madame Arkadina
(and prima donna), is not one to suppress her true feelings on her son's
contribution to the theatre: she abhors it. Humiliated, Constantine sulks
over his life, his art, and dotes on the play's star, the woman he loves,
Nina, who is infatuated with Madame Arkadina's companion, the established
writer Boris Trigorin. Since Trigorin is the object of affection for Nina,
as well as Madame Arkadina, he becomes the object of scorn and jealousy
for Constantine. In an attempt to explain his brooding, morbid nature,
Constantine presents Nina with a dead seagull, which he has just shot -
a sacrificial symbol of events to come. Before the evening is over the
characters dreams, infidelities, and self-deceptions will be revealed:
Nina's reluctance to love Constantine; Trigorin's lust for Nina; Masha's
love for Constantine and boredom with her new husband; Dorn's insecurities
on his ageing appearance and his affair with Polina; and Sorin's constant
pleadings with his sister Arkadina to accept and encourage his nephew,
her son. Two summers later finds Constantine the successful writer; Masha,
a drunk, lamenting her love for Constantine; Madame Arkadina, haggard and
struggling to hold onto Trigorin; and Nina, returning to the lake after
her failed acting career and rueful involvement with Trigorin, seeking
sympathy and understanding from the disturbed Constantine, who still loves
her enough to take his own life. Play. Adapted from his novel by Michael Frayn A small office. Terry runs
an Organisations campaigning for freedom of information which is funded by
his girlfriend who also organises the close-knit staff. When Hilary, a Civil
Servant, arrives with a highly confidential file detailing a cover-up Terry
is given a not-to-be-missed opportunity. But his increasingly intimate involvement
with Hilary presents him with a personal and professional dilemma, exposing
the ultimate irony that everyone has something to hide. |