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Play. William Norfolk Maria-Theresa Paradies is sent to Doctor Mesmer to cure her blindness.
Mesmer's treatment is based on what he terms 'animal-magnetism'.
Maria is asked to stay in his house for the duration of the treatment.
Inevitably gossip follows and the treatment ends in scandal. Maria
returns to her parents' home and resumes her career as a blind pianist
while most of Vienna is convinced that Mesmer is nothing more than
a charlatan. Period 1777 Vienna Farce. Brandon Thomas This classic evergreen farce is set in Oxford during Commemoration
Week in 1882. The imminent visit of Charles Wykeham's aunt from Brazil,
Donna Lucia, provides an excuse for Charles and Jack to invite their
young ladies to meet her. When a telegram arrives postponing Donna
Lucia's visit, they persuade their amiable friend Babbs (since they
must have a chaperone) to impersonate the aunt - and the fun begins. Drama. Horton Foote. 8 men, 3 women. Two Interiors. Sheriff Hawes, honest and sincere peace officer, tired of his job
and its usual run of irritating problems, such as runaway boys, small
robberies and the like, is making plans for his retirement. A local
boy, Bubber Reeves, escapes from the penitentiary where he is serving
a life term. He heads for his hometown, obsessed with the idea of
killing Hawes who has become for him the symbol of all he hates.
The town is terrified of Bubber and wants him killed. Hawes is determined
to take him alive and send him back to the penitentiary. Eventually
Hawes traces Bubber to a cabin, but Bubber does not want to be captured
and forces Hawes to kill him. Heartbroken over his failure, Hawes
goes back to the jail to resign immediately, but his wife convinces
him that he is needed in his job, and he decides to continue. Farce. Ray Cooney. 7 men, 3 women. Interior Holding a top secret post in the Ministry of Defence, Commander Rimmington, of Her Majesty's Navy, must watch appearances, and he is not always pleased by the carryings-on of his impulsive daughter Nancy. Her latest escapade begins when her friend, ballerina Alicia Courtney, arrives breathlessly to announce that the great Russian dancer, Petrovyan, has decided to defect to the West - and that she has smuggled him out of London in the boot of the Commander's car. The first question is how to distract the Commander while Petrovyan is sneaked into the house, but then, after the Commander goes off fishing, the problems really begin to mount. An official appears with a coded message for the Commander and, in an attempt to get rid of him quickly, the Commander is impersonated by Nancy's fiancé, Gerry Buss. As they try to hide Petrovyan, the trumped-up stories and assumed identities mushroom hilariously, while agents from the Russian embassy lurk outside in the bushes, the local constable blunders in at the wrong time, the government official gets pleasantly tipsy, and Gerry suddenly finds himself face to face with the man he is impersonating. Then, miraculously, a chance for Petrovyan's escape emerges out of the tumult. But after all the riotous confusion, including being stuck halfway out of the chimney, Petrovyan has had enough. Concluding that the English must be mad, he opts for the sanity of State control - so back to Moscow, leaving his would-be benefactors to straighten out the mayhem still churning in his wake. Chase Me Up Farndale Avenue, S'Il Vous Plait! Comedy.
David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jnr Le farce Français est arrivé! Bubbling comme une glasse
de champagne, ces femmes formidables and leur chef d'étage,
Gordon, fizz leur way avec panache entre un plot unintelligible,
un plethora de pontes, et un grand range de characteurs. Oo-la-la,
le show-stopping moment de Thelma ... mais pour dire quelque chose
else would spoilé le surprise - ah, quelle surprise! - Vive
les dames de Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic
Society! Play. Jack Shepherd This could be the last gig for Les Padmore and his jazz band. Wes, the founder of the club, is on life-support and there are rifts between the players. Les looks back to a golden age of jazz and is suspicious of the younger, more progressive band members, who are all are seeking a balance to the chaos of their lives. This is a gritty play, full of wry philosophy. Comedy. John Patrick. 2 men, 3 women. Interior. Faced with the responsibility of looking after their orphaned niece,
Theresa and Angelica, two middle-aged sisters, have settled on the
idea of impersonating begging nuns in order to sent Tania to art
school in Europe, but as the play begins they have run into double
trouble: an agile young cat burglar is about to make off with their
ill-gotten gains; and a suspicious policeman has followed Theresa
(and her collection bucket) home. However all is not as desperate
as it seems, as the personable young thief happens to be a medical
student who steals to pay his tuition-(atkl is willing to consider
alternate means of fund raising) while the cop, as it turns'our,
is also not above taking what he can on the. side. So the four join
fotces for some inspired larceny and things go swimmingly - or do
until the supposedly saintly Tania turns up unannounced. Trying to
hide the truth from their niece, Theresa and Angelica decide to "go
straight," which also, unfortunately, means going broke, and results
in a series of hilarious misunderstandings. In the end, however,
it develops that Tania is not quite the paragon her aunts believed
her to be - but the confession of her own misdeeds (she is an accomplished
art forger) is steadily forgiven when she also reveals that the rather
considerable earnings from her illegal activities are merrily piling
up interest in a Swiss bank! Play.
Leslie Sands Subtitled A Play on Murder, this is a witty and theatrical
thriller. The career of famous TV actor Peter Conway is in the doldrums,
his financial stale is parlous, he has a drink problem and his long
suffering wife Stella has had enough. Secretly, he has been having
an affair with Lori, an American actress, and Stella's death brings
the police to his upmarket London home. It looks an open and shut
case but is what we see real or unreal? Play A. R. Gurney, based on the stories of John Cheever. 3 men, 3 women. Unit set John Cheever, master chronicler of Americas post-war angst and alienation,
and how it affected a burgeoning suburban class, left a storehouse
of dramatic possibilities in his fiction, largely unexplored purely
by dint of his chosen artistic medium: prose. In A Cheever Evening,
A. R. Gurney brings to light these possibilities through his mastery
of stagecraft. Adapting no fewer than seventeen of Cheever's most
funny and moving of stories, Gurney probes the affairs of that set
of people (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who once felt in the majority,
but soon found themselves in the twilight of their power and at the
mercy of a changing world. Seen through the lens of A.R. Gurney's
dramatic sensibility, Cheever's separate stories of a fragmented
and lonely universe combine into a whole and resonant portrait -
that of a culture which, while teetering on the brink of extinction,
combats loss with humour, wit and feeling. Play. Anton Chekhov, translated
by Michael Frayn This translation of Chekhov's last and most elusive play was originally produced at the National Theatre in 1978, with Dorothy Tutin, Albert Finney, Robert Stephens and Ralph Richardson. Michael Frayn revised this edition for the 1989 production at the Aldwych Theatre, with Judi Dench, Ronald Pickup, Bernard Hill and Michael Gough. 'Frayn's translation, which strikes me as splendidly lucid and alive ... will be acted again and again.' New Statesman Play. Anton Chekhov, adapted
by David Mamet The Cherry Orchard is the story of a mortgage, with the grounds and beautiful trees of the proud landowners going for sale at a public auction to pay off their debts to the boorish son of a peasant who has risen in the world. Mme Ranevskaya's family departs to take up their lives anew, leaving the old and forgotten Firs to die alone as the woodsmen's axes thud ironically against the cherished trees. Anton Chekhov, Trans S. Mulrine Ranevskaya can no longer afford to keep her childhood home and estate
with its beautiful but barren cherry orchard. Warm, generous and
feckless, she is unable to face the reality of losing everything
so rejects the compromise offered by Lopakhin, a local businessman,
to cut down the orchard and sell the land for holiday homes. Eventually
Ranevskaya and her family have to face financial ruin as they are
forced to leave the whole estate, which Lopakhin has now bought This
brand new translation is brilliantly faithful to Chekhov's painful
comedy of human existence. Original first performed in 1904. Play. Anton Chekhov, adapted by Jean-Claude van Itallie. 9 men, 5 women, extras. 2 Interiors, 1 Exterior. The action takes place at the country estate of Madame Ranevskaya,
an estate famed for its beautiful cherry orchard - and soon to be
sold at auction unless the unpaid taxes are paid. As the play begins
Madame Ranevskaya has returned from Paris where she has frittered
away the last of her fortune on a cynical young lover. It is soon
apparent that neither she, nor her family and friends, can come to
grips with the crushing reality which they must face, or truly fathom
the loss which threatens them. Instead they continue to go on as
if nothing had changed, and only the rich merchant Lopakhin, the
nouveau riche son of a peasant, seems to realise the gravity of the
situation. Ironically it is he who bids successfully for the estate
and who sets his men to felling the trees as, in the bittersweet
finale, Madame Ranevskaya departs again for Paris and the fragile
promise of a new and perhaps better life. Play. Arnold Wesker The play is a family saga of East End people, outspoken and provocative,
covering their gradual disillusionment as their ideals slip away
before and during the Second World War. This is the first of a trilogy
of which Roots and I'm Talking About Jerusalem are
the sequels. |