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The
Learned Ladies Molière's satire of intellectual
snobbery focuses on the womenfolk of Chrysale's household,
who look on all but intellectual pursuits as worthless, and
spurn love in favour of learning. The heroine, Chrysale's
daughter Henriette, wants to marry Clitandre but her mother
wishes her to marry the poet Trissotin, who is worming his
way into the household in order to marry Henriette for her
family's fortune. When his avaricious plot is discovered, he
is sent away in disgrace, leaving Henriette free to marry
Clitandre as she wishes. Molière's play was written
in 1682. This adaptation was first performed by the RSC in
1997 Leaving
Home. Play. Julia
Kearsley A touching, yet humorous play which wryly
examines the effects of loss and dependency on the family.
When Dad walks out, his family must try to come to terms
with his mysterious disappearance: his grief-stricken wife,
his pregnant, widowed daughter, his slightly eccentric son,
and his career girl stepdaughter. But the arrival of
down-at-heel Malcolm brings about an amazing transformation.
'Not least of the author's qualities is a sparky,
unpredictable humour ...' New Statesman Lend
Me A Tenor.
Comedy. Ken Ludwig A concert in Ohio in 1934 is jeopardised
when the lead Italian tenor falls into a drunken stupor. So
the impresario's diminutive assistant blacks up and goes on
as Othello. The tenor awakens, dons his costume, and thence
follows an hilarious comedy involving two Othellos, a
volatile Italian wife, an outrageous bellhop and a cynical
impresario. 'A furiously paced comedy with more than a touch
of the Marx brothers ... wonderful farcical moments and
funny lines ...' Time Out Lent.
Play. Michael Wilcox Orphan Paul Blake's prep school is also his home. So, when the other boys leave for the 1956 Easter vacation, Paul is thrown upon the company of the despised headmaster and his wife and his somewhat eccentric grandmother, Mrs Blake. He is befriended by fellow sufferer Matey, the elderly Latin master also condemned to spend his vacation at the school, who provides an avuncular companionship for the boy on the painful, yet exciting, verge of adolescence. Lenz.
Play. Mike Stott, loosely based on the story by George
Buchner Jacob Lenz, gifted, highly intelligent but seriously unbalanced, is invited to stay at the house of Oberlin, a philanthropic parson. The play examines the effects on the household of Lenz's erratic, sometimes dangerous, behaviour, which gradually makes him the centre of all attention and activity, and ultimately, madness is powerfully depicted as the height of selfishness. Oberlin's compassionate, Christian attempt to give Lenz love and shelter fails, and he is returned to Strasbourg. Period 1778 Léocadia.
Play. Jean Anouilh, translated
by Timberlake Wertenbaker This is a new translation, broadcast on BBC Radio, of the Anouilh play which first appeared in 1939. Léocadia was an opera singer who died after three blissful days of love with Prince Albert who has mourned her ever since. His aunt, the Duchess, does everything she can to help him and finds Amanda, who bears a striking resemblance to Léocadia, and encourages her to lay Léocadia's ghost which she does with honesty and gentle perseverance. Lessons
and Lovers: D. H. Lawrence in New
Mexico.
Play. Olwen Wymark This beautifully written play is set
chiefly on Lawrence's New Mexico ranch between the years
192245, and also in the present. It centres on the
extraordinary personality of Lawrence who inspires fierce
loyalty in the women around him and the love between Freida
and Lawrence which survives the conflict of their two strong
characters and the pain of Lawrence's last years. This is
observed and commented on by a professor and his four
students, involved both inside and outside the action. The
Letter-Box (in
Scot-Free) 'The audience was absolutely riveted to
the plight of a battered wife, thrown out of the house by
her husband and trying to explain the situation to her young
daughter through the letter-box' Inverness Focus. A
Letter of Resignation.
Play. Hugh Whitemore 1963 was an amazing year and life was changing. Britain was becoming a different place and to many people, Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, seemed outdated and irrelevant - an Edwardian grandee lingering uncomfortably in the world of E-type Jaguars, Carnaby Street and Beatlemania. But few were aware that his life was scarred by domestic unhappiness and sexual betrayal. Hugh Whitemore explores the events that lay hidden behind the headlines and examines a complex web of personal and political morality. Lettice
and Lovage.
Comedy. Peter Shaffer Daughter of an actress who toured with an
all-female company playing Shakespeare's plays, Lettice has
inherited both theatricality and eccentricity. Now employed
as a tourist guide in a shabby stately home, she enlivens
its dull history with her own over-imaginative fantasies,
until she is caught in the act and promptly sacked. She is
later visited by the starchy Preservation Trust official who
fired her, and an unlikely friendship develops between the
two. |