Thomas Dekker : 11-20m, 3-8f, extras, doubling. Classic drama. Multipurpose set. Mark Rylance, Artistic Director of The Globe, and Jack Shepherd
have adapted Dekker's two-part, seven-hour play into a three-hour
'darkly satisfying piece ... achieving both pace and narrative clarity
... The Honest Whore is a real find ... it is a surprisingly
modern work about sexual betrayal and emotional violence, relieved
by moments of cruel comedy.' Daily Telegraph. First performed
in 1604, revived at Shakespeare's Globe 1998. Drama. Joanna Murray-Smith. 1 man, 3 women. Unit set After thirty-two years, a marriage shatters into pieces. Acclaimed
journalist Gus leaves Honor, a poet, wife and mother, for Claudia,
a bright young journalist not much older than his and Honor's twenty-Four-year-old
daughter, Sophie. In the wake of new passion stands Honor, who must
come to grips with the career she has willingly sacrificed for her
husband and child, the evolution of a marriage, her abandonment and
eventual resurrection. Gus must face the consequences of betraying
his own long-held principles about duty and justice, of leaving a
secure love for the raptures of passion. Claudia confronts the darkness
of her own impulses and learns that to love truly and wisely,is to
understand moral responsibility. In a series of intense confrontations,
the wife, husband, lover and daughter negotiate the forces of passion,
lust, history, responsibility and honour. This story, Greek in its
examination of the fundamental human experience, is also utterly
contemporary. A familiar story is told in a distinctly original way,
using theatrical language that is darkly comic, highly poetic and
uncompromisingly savage. Comedy Ted Tally. 2 men, 2 women. Unit set Two young men, both nineteen and visiting Cape Cod for an adventuresome
weekend, spot two attractive girls, slightly older than themselves,
and set about trying to pick them up. The eagerness of the boys is
contrasted with the disinterest of the girls - although the prettier
of the latter (knowing very well what is in the air) is more intrigued
than her friend would like. Events then move on to a very funny beach
picnic, with much beer-drinking and suggestive talk, after which
one of the boys does indeed "score" with the more attractive girl.
But, in doing so, he sheds his "macho" image, and the relative naïveté
of the boys is effectively and humorously contrasted with the unsuspected
worldliness of the girls. In the end the boys' bravado is shattered
completely, but it is dear that a new and valuable awareness of the
ways of the world (and "older" women) has replaced it. Play: Stephen Black : 1 man, 1 woman, 1 boy, 1 girl. Interior Sitting in the makeshift and sadly shrunken waiting room of the Cincinnati railroad station, Neva Jo tries to divert her restless children with stories of her youth, when the railroads were in their glory and her traveling salesman father often took her with him on his far-flung and exciting trips. They are waiting for one of the now infrequent trains, and Neva Jo laments the deterioration. A young soldier comes by and but senses that Neva Jo and her brood are not really going on the arriving train which only height ens her alienation. As the train arrives, and mother and children pick up their belongings to depart ... but not to board the train, but to go back to the numbing routine of a life from which, for a brief time, they have found some measure of escape. Play. Brendan Behan The play is about a young Cockney soldier who is taken as a hostage for an IRA man who is due to be hanged in Belfast. His captors are obsessed with memories of 1916 and dreams of Irish freedom. His companions in the disreputable lodging house where he is held prisoner are a cross-section of Dublin derelicts. As well as being a profound comment on Anglo-Irish relations and the Irish themselves, it is also full of comedy. Drama. Paula Vogel. 1 man, 1 woman, 1 boy, 1 girl, various voices. Unit set Charlene is in her thirties, the mother of two randy teenagers,
just trying to support her family after divorcing her abusive husband,
Clyde. She does this by writing screenplays for adult films. Not
your typical job perhaps, but it brings in the needed cash. When
the kids find out how their mother makes a living, youd think there'd
be a problem, but there isrit. Charlene is just a mom, worried about
the kids staying out too late and having wild friends. Her son Cal
and daughter Lesley Ann are normal teens, both growing up faster
than any parent would want (especially Lesley Ann). Life is a cycle
and it goes on and on, but then her husband Clyde shows up, breaking
the restraining order. What was once there for Charlene and Clyde
will always be there, but what tore them apart is stronger than what
brought them together. And now Clyde has a gun, and what was left
of this family - what worked about this family - is torn apart, with
tragic results. Caryl Churchill, Music by Orlando Gough : 6m 9f. Two part jazz-opera. Multi-purpose set. In Eight Rooms, the first part of this piece, fourteen people -
tourists, couples, business people - spend an ordinary night in a
hotel. But they all occupy the same space at the same time ... 'A
densely layered modern opera ... The characters communicate in jagged,
incomplete phrases, overlap and form unwitting duets and trios with
people they never encounter, as they struggle with insomnia or with
dreams or wake up in an adulterous bed panicking about children at
home' Independent Play. John Osborne | M5 F4. An hotel room. Gus, Laurie and Amy with their respective husbands and wives are all planning a weekend away in Amsterdam to escape the influence of the producer, 'the biggest, most poisonous, voracious, Machiavellian dinosaur in movies'. Although they agreed to keep their arrangement secret, word does get out. Finally a telephone call announces that the producer is dead- suicide. In the period which culminates in this climax we have also learnt a good deal about the three couples themselves. Play. Lanford Wilson The scene is the lobby of a rundown hotel, so seedy that it has
lost the "e" from its marquee. As the action unfolds, the
residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned,
meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one
day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters
and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into
a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character
emerges clearly and perceptively defined, and the sum total of what
they are — or wish they were — becomes a poignant, powerful
call to America to recover lost values and to restore itself in its
own and the world's eyes. Farce. Georges Feydeau and Maurice
Desvallieres. English adaptation by Peter Glenville Boniface arrives at the Hotel Paradiso to meet Marcelle; Maxime has been enticed there by an enterprising and amorous maidservant; Cot goes there to investigate the strange noises which he is convinced emanate from the drains. In order to avoid extremely compromising confrontations, everyone spends the entire night dashing up and down the stairs and in and out of beds in a crescendo of hilarious chaos which is made even worse by a sudden police raid on the unsavoury hotel. Period 1910 Play. Harold Pinter It is Christmas Day and a mysterious death and an unexpected birth are troubling Roote, the director of a Government 'rest home'. Who the patients are and what they might be suffering from, we never discover, but as the unstable, megalomaniacal and terminally insecure Roote begins to investigate, we find that the other members of staff are, in various ways, as mad and as dangerous as the people they are supposed to be helping. Play Harold Pinter. 6 men, 1 woman. Interior The scene is a government institution, possibly mental or medical
and presumably penal, where the inmates are kept behind locked gates
and are referred to by number rather than name. In charge is Roote,
a pompous ex-colonel who is surely as psychologically disturbed as
his charges, and who is abetted by two main lackeys: the quietly
sinister Gibbs and a seedy alcoholic appropriately named Lush. There
is also the sexy Miss Cutts, whose favours appear to be shared by
the various staff members. Among the matters at issue are the disturbing
fact that one of the patients has given birth to a baby, though no
one has filed an official report about having had sex with her, and
also the need for Roote to pull himself together to address the understaff
Christmas party. In the final essence these bureaucratic crises hardly
matter, however, as the play ends as ominously as it began, with
a burst of lethal violence which leaves only one survivor to search
for answers and, perhaps, to accept responsibility for the chaos
which has ensued. |