- February 2025
ZOE: I don’t know why you insisted on sleeping together like kids. We were eighteen, for god’s sake…
RUWEENA: I just got lonely sleeping without you.
Six years ago, Ruweena and Zoe were best friends - well, sort of. Actually, it was more like Ruweena followed Zoe everywhere, from lunchtime to after school and even to uni, while Zoe kind of… tolerated her.
Then, six years ago, Ruweena disappeared and left Zoe all alone. Zoe likes it better this way. Doesn't she? So why is it that she still keeps the single bed they used to sleep in - why is it that she lets Ruweena kiss her the moment Ruweena reappears?
And why does it feel as if there's something terribly, awfully wrong with the bed they used to call theirs?
- November 2024
About a student actor slowly coming to the unpleasant realisation that she’s been cast as the lead in an (intended) snuff film. But really about gazes/perspective and narrative control, gendered power dynamics and violation, and "authenticity" in making films (but hopefully in, like, a fun and not-pretentious way).
- October 2024
SHORT FILM
Oh those bright young things...
Born of a compound of grief and relief,
How they dazzle and shimmer and daze
Pia’s twentieth birthday. The start of a decade of glitter and glare; there must be a reason it’s roaring. Soph, for one, cannot wait to turn twenty. Pia couldn’t care less.
Like a moth to a flame, Soph dotes on her friend with delight, planning her a birthday party like no other. But appearances can be deceiving, and you can’t dote forever on a dream.
- June 2024
Student short film, to be screened in May Week
England, 1422. Sister Juliana has disappeared. The convent has spun into chaos. One nun decides to sit down in the confession booth and tell the truth once and for all.
“Bad Habit” will be an experimental mystery short film, told through a series of confessions, featuring goldfish, face masks and a mushroom trip. All set in medieval England.
Follow our insta @bad_habit_short for more details, behind the scenes and screening details!
- November 2021
‘FERRET’ is an upcoming original student short film set in Cambridge, about the boundary between friendship, obsession and ultimately, on the desire to be accepted.
This film aims to be an intoxicating and psychologically wrenching black comedic thriller, taking inspirations from films such as ‘Heathers’ (1988), ‘Black Swan’ (2010), 'Gone Girl' (2014) and ‘The Favourite’ (2018).
After post-production, it will be premiered and entered into a number of film festivals.
Funded in part by Other Brother Studios, winner of the 2021 Film Fund.
- November 2021
The Old Bailey Alumni Network is a new, devised production that brings to life stories from the archives of the Old Bailey Courthouse. It is a huge party, a who’s-who of the most audacious, gregarious, and fun-loving Londoners from the eighteenth century, and we get to hear their stories, live their memories and celebrate life with them!
- July 2021
Six months on from the death of his mother, introverted Sam has retreated even more into his shell. He is depressed and achingly lonely, with only his psychiatrist for company. But that all changes when he meets Katy, a bright and bubbly girl who turns his bleak world upside down. Things begin to look up for him as Katy imbues his life with colour. It seems almost too good to be true. And it is. One fateful day, the illusion is shattered, and Sam has to learn that people can’t be so easily replaced, and the void so easily filled.
A student written film, Flowers for Katy is an exploration of grief, loneliness and the male gaze.
- November 2020
"What makes you who you are? A name? An address? A random collection of experiences, a few memories?... You are who you can prove you are. And that's the easiest thing in the world to change." When a young executive reaches breaking point and decides to disappear, he pays a visit to a master of the craft in a seafront fortune tellers in Southend. Haunted by visitations from a pathologist who swears he is already lying flat out on her slab, he begins a nightmarish journey to the edge of existence that sees him stripped of everything that made him who he was.
- November 2019
Sidney Bruhl, an academic and struggling playwright, has writer's block. That is until he reads Deathtrap, a tour-de-force murder mystery laden with plot twists, psychological horror and emotional intensity. It’s just a shame that an unproven upstart wrote the masterpiece – but what if there was a way Sidney could make it his own? Time to invite the playwright round for tea…
Deathtrap, arguably Ira Levin's greatest play, still holds the record for the longest-running comedy-thriller on Broadway, consistently staggering audiences for decades. Now, brought to life at the ADC Theatre, Deathtrap promises an all-too-real comedy-thriller that hits like no other.
"I'd like to beat the wretch over the head with the mace there, bury him in a four-hundred-pound hole somewhere, and send the thing off under my own name."
- November 2019
Ben and Oscar have been best friends since the first day of school. They have grown up together, experiencing all the trials and tribulations of childhood and puberty by each other’s sides. Now, as young adults, they meet again for the first time in years. Their history may remain unspoken, but how long can they go before their past catches up with them?
Big Boys Don’t Cry explores manhood and puberty, and how we try to convince ourselves that we’re doing just fine.
- August 2019
Ritual madness has descended upon Thebes. Dionysius is demanding obedience at all costs - but is his chaos less liberating than it first appears? With Pentheus’ own mother lost to Bacchic celebration, the King is determined to shame and punish the new God. Civilisation declares war on instinct as the divine tears up the mortal.
This visceral new production provokes uneasy questions and demands uneasy answers. Explore the fear of the unknown as this divine tragedy exposes the cracks in our own moral codes. Our fundamental values are broken down in this horrifyingly compelling examination of society and the self.
- June 2019
!CHANGED! Now being performed outdoors on the beautiful Caius Court that is unsurprisingly in Gonville College.
Can the sly fox of Venice get away with it? Or is his trusty servant, Mosca, the one that's really in control?
This dark comedy promises to have provide all the entertainment your life is lacking, and all the relevance to the Vote Leave campaign that no one wants, yet even we can't avoid.
As the greedy Volpone attempts to con his way into more wealth is he finally undone by that which we covet most?
- April 2019
A: And what does he look like?
N: He looks like he was drawn on the back of a receipt with a biro pen.
Benson's back, having spent the past seven years locked inside his creator's subconscious. He's been through it. He looks like shit. He's developed a penchant for reality TV and playground swings. He's also somewhat imaginary.
A meditation on friendship and Bensons, this piece examines shared grief and the lost creations of childhood.
- February–March 2019
A writer in a totalitarian state is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories, and their similarities to a number of child-murders that are happening in his town.
This amateur production of “The Pillowman” is presented by special arrangement with
SAMUEL FRENCH LTD.
- February 2019
A Plane Old Sketch Show is a show that is entirely gimmick free. It has grown bored of the usual tropes and tricks of sketch shows at the moment and aims to provide a show that is entirely free of artifice and silly stunts. Except it is entirely set on a plane. But beyond that the show promises to be a simple sketch show, combining irreverence and wit from the troupe described by Broadway Baby as “terrifying brilliant”. Cambridge Footlights Friso de Graaf and Gabriel Barton-Singer return to the Corpus Playroom following the success of their hit show No Funny Business to provide an hour of mirth, merriment and the world’s most ridiculous puns.
- June 2016
"O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep!"
Ferdinand and his friends have just arrived in Cambridge, and the next three years are mapped out for them: sleep three hours a night, work the rest of the day, and (most importantly) never see women. However, the boys have a few surprise visitors - Ferdinand’s old flame from his gap year in France has come to Cambridge, and she’s brought her girlfriends with her. And there’s a ‘fantastical spaniard’ touring the place, looking for love but never quite finding it. Will true love triumph? The clue is in the title.
Shakespeare’s most intelligent and self-aware comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a Blackadder-esque satire on the pretentiousness of Cambridge and its students.
- February 2016
The Fletcher Players and Shadwell Society bring you “Smorgasbord”: a brand-new festival showcasing the most exciting and original extracts from emerging student playwrights.
Hosted the Corpus Playroom, this is a casual opportunity for writers to have their work performed on-stage, with the chance for the pieces to be discussed and critiqued afterwards by the audience.
Unlike many other writing festivals, there are no limits to the works being presented – they can be complete plays, extracts from a larger piece, or rough first drafts – as long as they are between 5 and 10 minutes in length.
Come and see some of the boldest works of new theatre in their rawest and most creatively fertile state
- June 2015
THE DRYDEN SOCIETY and THE SHADWELL SOCIETY PRESENT 'SUPER'.
The Justice League of North West and Central London, Potters Bar and Cuffley want to use their newfound superpowers to 'fight crime and s**t'. The Siblinghood of Evil want to use theirs for 'maximum personal gain, minimum collateral damage'. The problem is, they unknowingly book the same room for their meetings. Posing respectively as a karate class and an urban dance team, members of the two groups meet, socialise and even date, all the while unaware that once they put their masks on, they're bitterest of enemies.
- May 2015
The Fletcher Players and Shadwell Society bring you “Smorgasbord”: a brand-new festival showcasing the most exciting and original extracts from emerging student playwrights.
Hosted the Corpus Playroom, this is a casual opportunity for writers to have their work performed on-stage, with the chance for the pieces to be discussed and critiqued afterwards by the audience.
Unlike many other writing festivals, there are no limits to the works being presented – they can be complete plays, extracts from a larger piece, or rough first drafts – as long as they are less than 10 minutes in length.
Come and see some of the boldest works of new theatre in their rawest and most creatively fertile state.
- June 2014
GCMS and the Shadwell Society are proud to present this week's Caius May Week Show, which will be a production of Lionel Bart's 'Oliver!'
We're currently putting together a production team, and will be holding auditions for main roles within a week. We would like to reassure all applicants that participation in the show will involve only minimal commitment before exams are over.
- June 2013
In the historic setting of Caius Court, the audience follow a day in the life of a teenage boy - meeting the 'ordinary people' he encounters along the way. A completely original production, this show will bring laughter, tears, dreams and poetry to May Week.
- November 2012
- November 2012
"I can't be the saint people dream of now. People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth."
Patti Smith, legendary punk-poet. Sam Shepard, revered playwright. Their brief relationship in the 1970s was fraught, a passionate yet all-too brief meeting of minds. 'Cowboy Mouth' is the result. Composed on one typewriter in their room at the Hotel Chelsea, the play offers an eccentric glimpse of these artists at the very start of their career, through the eyes of their projected characters, Slim and Cavale, holed up together in a room. They fight, tell each other stories, and are surrounded by rock'n'roll, French poetry and the potential of separation at every verbal turn. They wait daily for the Lobster Man, who brings them food, and perhaps for something more, for 'un cavale': an escape.
- June 2012
If you took every single Shakespearean comedy, and mixed them all up with some Othello and Brothers Grimm, then you would get Cymbeline. The plot is a ridiculous fairy tale involving star-crossed lovers, a wicked stepmother, cross-dressing, a sleeping potion, a beheading, kidnapped heirs, hidden letters, a Roman invasion, and Jupiter descending from the sky. The play is both parody and sincerity, comedy and drama – and filled with a cast of lovable, hilarious, maniacal, and poignant characters.
- November 2011
On Midsummer's Eve 1889, in a sweltering basement kitchen, Miss Julie asks her footman to dance.
"He's trembling, the big strong boy”...
From the Director who brought you Endgame, ('exhausting'…'brilliant' …'utterly enervating to watch' - Cambridge Tab, 'darkly amusing' …'wonderful', ***** Varsity), we bring you the dangerous joy of August Strindberg's Miss Julie, stunningly re-imagined by award-winning playwright Helen Cooper.
- June 2011
‘Ten little soldier boys, went out to dine One choked his little self, and then there were nine…’
Ten guests are invited to a lonely house on a remote island. On arrival, they discover an eerie nursery rhyme and ten little toy soldiers, ready to be knocked over… On their first night, each of the guests is accused of being a murderer who has escaped justice. It becomes increasingly clear that they have been gathered under false pretences and with sinister intent. They soon realize that they are unable to escape. As the net tightens, everybody begins to question innocent appearances.
One by one, the ten are murdered, their deaths strangely echoing the children’s nursery rhyme. One by one, the toy soldiers disappear. The tension grows as they realize the killer must be amongst their numbers. When everybody is a suspect, will they discover the killer in time?
- March 2011
Cat’s got big feet so her boyfriend calls her Duck. She’s also got a middle-aged lover who drinks and writes novels, a best friend with a short fuse, a dysfunctional family, and a boyfriend with a nightclub, a gun, and some unfinished business. But which of these threads will she follow?
Premiered at the Royal Court in 2003, Duck is the hilarious and moving dark comedy from Irish playwright Stella Feehily, a provocative coming-of-age story about teenagers on the brink, growing up in the face of everything a city can throw at them. But girls just wanna have fun, and how can you learn to be good when your elders are no longer your betters? Somehow, they must learn to cope or find a way of escaping.
Witty, sharply-observed and highly relevant to modern society, Duck is a show that will make you question the nature of sex, love, family and friendship, and all that falls in between them.
“Duck hurls its audience into the heart of ladette culture… without doubt, an adrenaline rush, a hyperventilating hymn to the age of the angry women.” The Evening Standard
"An exhilarating piece of theatre" The Scotsman
"Immensely engaging and vibrant" The Financial Times
Tickets on sale in advance from the Cambridge Arts Theatre on 01223503333, or available on the door.
- February 2011
Julia: Rich. Spoilt. Famous. And now just one more in a long list of high-profile figures caught up in high-profile affairs. Except it’s 8.A.D., and her grandfather Augustus Caesar has legislated for public and private morality; an example must be made, and in Rome, it will invariably be made of a woman.
A new play by Niall Wilson, previously shortlisted for the Marlowe Society ‘Other Prize’ and writer of ‘Ava Adore’ (4* Varsity), in which celebrity righteousness and classical morals shape one royal tearaway and her claim to just want a little bit of fun.
- January 2011
'Genuine smiles aren't actually about the eyes; they're about the muscles around the eyes. Train those and you can pretend to enjoy just about anything... like Travel Scrabble or physical contact.'
By turns both laugh-out-loud funny and tragic, The Study of Young Men is a new play written by Adam McNally. It centres on Anthony, a man caught up in the breakdown of his friendship with his schoolmates, Rob, Charlie and Jonah. Trying to write down all that has happened between his friends, Anthony's memories come to life around him. As the play progresses, he desperately tries to keep control of his renegade memories, which appear to be developing their own personalities and points of view.
The Study of Young Men gives the opportunity for four actors to work on an ensemble piece with four meaty parts, incorporating comedy, physical theatre and tragic moments.
Auditions will be held in THE BATEMAN ROOM at GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE (ask for directions in the main Porters' Lodge) on:
Wednesday: 12.00-14.30 Thursday: 14.00-16.00 Friday: 12.15-13.45
- November 2010
Described by Alan Bennett as "an inquiry in which the circumstances are imaginary but the paintings real", 'A Question of Attribution' depicts the final years in the career of Anthony Blunt, the celebrated art historian and Surveyor of Pictures to the Queen, who for many years was a double agent in the employ of the KGB. Shadwell and the Freshers of Caius College offer an exciting new production of this "razor-sharp psychological melodrama" (New York Times).
- August 2010
Shadwell Opera, 2009 Herald Angel Award winners, return to Rosslyn Chapel with Mozart’s 'The Magic Flute' and a new production of Benjamin Britten's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Don’t miss out on Cambridge University’s best young opera singers: 'star power in spades … my show of the festival' (Scotsman). Shadwell Opera’s production of Mozart’s Masonic masterpiece received wide critical acclaim at last year’s Fringe. The production returns this year, updated to further the dialogue with the mysterious symbolism of Rosslyn Chapel, and is complemented by a new production of Britten’s 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream'. 'Rosslyn Chapel’s renaissance has been sealed by Shadwell Opera' (Financial Times).
Shadwell Opera, 2009 Herald Angel Award winners, complement their revival of 'The Magic Flute' at Rosslyn Chapel with a daring new production of Benjamin Britten’s masterful operatic adaption of Shakespeare’s classic play. In the mystical atmosphere of Rosslyn Chapel, you will be taken, transformed, post-rave, into a living, breathing, hallucinogenic, black-white, day-night, dark-light forest of dreams, where everything is reflection, illusion the only reality, theatricality the only truth; where though we wake, yet still we dream. Don’t miss this beautiful exploration of identity, dreams, sexuality, theatre, and the transient nature of love.
- June 2010
Sondheim's "Into the woods" is a unique show, combining magical staging and costume with some of the classiest of Sondheim's music, and an off-the-wall, tongue-in-cheek undercurrent that mixes the Brothers Grimm with Shrek, and maybe just a bit of Glee to boot. There is no chorus part, however there are nearly 20 leads, varying from the major (Cinderella, the Witch, Jack, the Baker...) to some minor (yet always well written) character roles - Cinderella's drunk father, her two Hot Sisters, to name but a few. The performance will be held on Sunday 13th June in the evening with a possibility of an open dress in the afternoon to make sure as many people as possible gets a chance to see this great show.
- January 2010
Rollo is a homeless millionaire. Le Douze Quatorze is a hopeless gambler. Missy and Clayton are incompatible. But widower Beethoven is on a labour of love...
These misplaced characters have to choose a new direction as they are diverted and diverting in their chance encounters. Moving on or staying put, clinging on to something or leaving it behind: they all must decide what to do next.
Quirky and fresh, Yo, My Man is a comedy about jazz, disappointment, self-delusion, and different kinds of hope.
- June 2009
The Comedy of Errors is a fast-paced farce that tells the story of two sets of identical twins accidentally separated at birth. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus, which turns out to be the home of their twin brothers, Antipholus of Ephesus and his servant, Dromio of Ephesus. When the Syracusans encounter the friends and families of their twins, a series of wild mishaps based on mistaken identities lead to wrongful beatings, a near-incestuous seduction, the arrest of Antipholus of Ephesus, and accusations of infidelity, theft, madness, and demonic possession. This is Shakespearean comedy at its best and will make for a fantastic May Week show in the grounds of Gonville and Caius College.
- March 2009
Corpus playroom will be transported back to a Gothic wilderness courtesy of 'The Vampire', J. R. Planché's melodramatic masterpiece. 'Something more than human' haunts the Scottish highlands in this exuberant, sometimes ridiculous drama, where a voracious vampire and a beautiful virgin take their places amongst the craggy cliffs and disembodied voices which animate Planche's creepy yet comic creation. As Lady Bridget exclaims, "Mercy preserve us! I tremble all over!"
- October–November 2007
A dinner party goes badly wrong. Sarah and Ralf are a young couple failing to find happiness in clubs or cinemas. They invite Sarah’s colleague Edith and her husband Bastian for dinner. Ralf jokes in poor taste that there’s a corpse in the trunk behind him. The level of taste descends as Bastian struggles to contain his violent discomfort at the prolonged joke, while his wife wants to join in the fun. Pizza is ordered. They discuss work. A defiled corpse falls out of the cupboard.
Mr Kolpert is a strikingly original work by a young writer, premièred at the Royal Court. It manages to fuse the excesses of Sarah Kane with the black humour of Pinter’s awkward interiors. This is a provocative, but above all a fantastically funny play. Nasty violence and guffaws: this says something about the way we live now, but we'll be too shocked and amused to care.
