- April–May 2024
Vignettes is a play of two halves: past and present, fever dream and reality, cause and effect. Frayed at their seams, however, the acts have an intimate yet strained relationship with one another- a tension present amongst the characters themselves. An unflinchingly all-access tour of a tortured psyche, the play tackles masculinity, sexuality, hereditary trauma, adolescence, the vital importance of art and the crushing burden of the past. Told through voices which ring out with continual authenticity, sometimes comfortingly, often chillingly, central to Vignettes is a poignant sense of realism; whilst often choosing to present itself in a surreal lens, the play has human tragedy at its core.
- April 2024
- March 2024
- March 2024
- March 2024
Every term, as part of its suite of new writing programmes, the Marlowe Society runs HATCH - a (sometimes) themed collage of the freshest new writing in Cambridge.
Apart from granting writers the opportunity to see their work put up on stage, it affords directors and actors the chance to easily hone their skills when interpreting scripts, and gives all three groups the chance to work together to create something special. HATCH is envisioned partly as a chance for people from the weekly Marlowe Writers’ Group to edit the writing exercises they have been working on and see them up on stage, but also for writers beyond Marlowe’s programmes to join the fold!
In line with the evening’s history as a low-stakes, relaxed opportunity to get involved with new writing - there will be no applications or auditions, and writers will be accepted on a rolling basis. What there will be are short pieces of new writing, and extracts from longer plays. And a lot of fun to be had by all, whether in the audience or on stage.
- March 2024
A cunning plan is coming to Cambridge…
Cambridge Does Comic Relief: Blackadder Goes Forth presents an adaption of the two best Blackadder episodes: Private Plane & Goodbyeee. You may disagree that these are the best, but you’d be wrong. Set in the trenches of the first world war, this black comedy follows Captain Blackadder's various attempts to escape his fate.
So come and see your favourites - General Melchett, Captain Flashheart, Darling and the rest - we're as excited as a very excited person who has a special reason to be excited for you to see us!
All profits will go to Comic Relief.
- March 2024
Adapted from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, this one-woman show is a closed event, celebrating the 40 Year Anniversary of Women's Matriculation at Corpus Christi College.
- March 2024
- March 2024
Death is at your door – she's only trying to tell you a knock-knock joke!
After a disappointing job interview with the Grim Reaper, Ariel Hebditch must take to the stage to pursue her second, far more stable career path of comedian. In her debut stand-up hour, your resident asexual goth takes you on a whistle-stop tour through her own personal haunted house. From werewolves to vampires to the devil herself, Skeleton Out of the Closet brings you a night of queer joy and the decidedly-more-hard-to-come-by gothic joy as your humerus entertainer promises you the time of your death!
- March 2024
"They've got no sense of what we're trying to achieve here!"
"You've gotta roll with it, you can't just hide yourself away!"
"For someone who's not the captain, you're doing a hell of a lot of captaining..."
It's the worst group project imaginable - and, it's in space.
From the writer of last year's Macroevolution: Variant B, KSOSES is a sci-fi comedy/drama about four astronauts trapped in a training simulation. Isala, Chenruth, Myraden, and Vos may all be individually gifted, but somehow, combined, they bring out the very worst in each other: sulking, pettiness, unbearable passive aggression - all this and much, much more. And, as if working together wasn't hard enough, something about their environment seems off... but how do you escape a simulation from the inside? Come for the sitcom, stay for the epic space adventure.
- March 2024
What's going on? Who am I? Who are you? What are you doing my house? Can you leave? All these questions and more will be answered (or not) in EUREKA!, a brand-new question themed sketch comedy show. We hope you leave the theatre more confused than ever before after an hour of mind-melting comedy, because if there's one thing Cambridge is known for, it's pointless and stupid shenanigans! I think...
- February 2024
What if you code-switch so hard
That you just switch?
That it just becomes the code?
What do you get when you put a Black-British Caribbean working-class woman in a predominantly white institution that seems to be praying on her downfall?
An identity crisis, that’s what.
‘Blackboard’ follows Adina, a headstrong, politically-minded 18-year-old starting her first term at the prestigious Fawcett institute, as she struggles to reconcile her attendance there with her identity. Watch as she attempts to navigate academia, friendship, love, and what seems to be an endless sea of microaggressions while the judging voices of her friends, her melodramatic inner-voice, and the enigmatic Black Council echo.
Will she crumble under the unbearable weight of impostor syndrome and ignorance? Will she remain true to her values, keeping her ‘Black Card’? And what’s up with the mysterious blackboard that seems to track her every mistake?
- February 2024
Liminal Space is Dominika Wiatrowska’s (almost) one-woman show about growing up in Poland, learning English as a second language and moving to the UK alone at the age of sixteen. Join her at the Corpus Playroom for an hour of storytelling, dance, and celebration of Slavic culture.
Learn answers to your burning questions, including: Which city's statue of Jesus reaches higher than that of Rio de Janeiro? How could we redefine the word 'prolific'? And how does it feel like to live life in a Liminal Space?
- February 2024
What do a sham poet, Count Dracula and the London MET have in common? Doggerel is a new comedy play written by Miles Hitchens, which considers the problem of authorship, how words are liable to take on lives of their own and the factors that go into interpreting them. The late Victorian poet Vincent Conquest is struggling to make ends meet. His customers believe his verse to be the key that will reveal their future lives, and he believes he’s fallen to the worst fate a poet can get, the writer of doggerel. That is until the mysterious Count Sorin finds the writings, holding them to be a bona fide confession of vampiredom. The spontaneous scribbler is now implicated in a revenge plot against Bram Stoker and his satirical account of crimes against the vampire race. Will he survive, or will his broken versifying see him slaughtered?
- February 2024
- February 2024
Smörgåsbord is the Corpus Playroom's own eclectic bi-annual showcase of new student-written theatre.
For over a decade, this evening has been a rite of passage for emerging student playwrights in Cambridge, and it’s the event at the heart of the Corpus Playroom’s calendar.
We particularly seek to give a spotlight to those who haven’t previously had their work audienced, and to anyone who feels that they have an underrepresented narrative or cultural lineage to bring to the fore.
Come and sample a platter of the most exciting new theater in town!
- February 2024
'Place like this - you know this - place like this gets in your blood. Once it's in your blood, you can't get it out.'
One night under Cardiff skies, four lost souls go searching for answers. After dark, when the city is quiet, their paths weave and collide. Their stories may be shocking, their morals may be ambiguous, but they all want salvation. When dawn breaks, their lives will go on, however there will be another night to contend with soon enough. Be prepared for a close-up glimpse into a heartbreaking world of choices and consequences in the Welsh capital. Can anyone really break free from their past?
- February 2024
‘You know, he would’ve done it himself if he could. He would’ve walked the whole way here, dug his own bleeding grave and laid down.’
‘But he didn’t. He asked us to do it instead.’
When Matt dies, he leaves behind a wife, a brother, and extensive instructions on how to make him a bog body. To complete this unusual final request Ada and Chris must first fake his funeral, smuggle his body to a remote Scottish island and finally bury him. Unfortunately, life (or more accurately, death) is never that simple and on this road trip Ada and Chris learn more about Matt, each other, themselves, and bog chemistry than either of them could have bargained for.
- February 2024
“I used to have dreams. Of disappearing into the jungle, and never coming back. And everything in the jungle would be upside down. Tigers would be blue, crows could be pink, mushrooms would glow, and nothing would be normal. But I was so happy in that jungle.”
Racked with homesickness in a strange, vast city, Jia Wei finds herself breaking down in the middle of a 24-hour convenience store -- until she is suddenly rescued by the charming Kim, a fellow customer, who shows her an unexpected kindness.
Soon, they begin to meet there most nights, and a romance quickly develops. Kim is enamoured with her - perhaps a little too much - and Jia Wei is persuaded to move into Kim’s grand mansion, nestled in the Malaysian countryside. However, this utopia turns nightmarish when Kim’s overbearing adoration takes a terrifying turn. Isolated and trapped in Kim’s dark house, will Jia Wei find a way out?
- January–February 2024
Imagine spending 19 years with someone you barely get along with over a single, continuous game of chess. What would you do? How far would you go to dissipate the boredom? In my new minimally-staged, mile-a-minute play, two mathematicians who drifted apart in life argue over and risk everything in death amid furious and hilarious wordplay and wit as a third mathematician and mutual acquaintance threatens to break them apart.
- January–February 2024
This re-staging of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party sees Stanley, a man we come to realise is suffering from dementia, across two days of his life and indeed his own birthday party. As chaos encroaches alongside the mysterious appearance of two sinister strangers, the space of the stage becomes unstable, and Stanley’s illness is reflected in the disorientation and absurdity that follows.
- January 2024
‘I may be a creature, but I am God’s creature!’
Margery Kempe is a normal housewife. She has fourteen children, a useless husband, and no education. But God has chosen her for a very special purpose. She’s been given the gift of tears, and she’s going to make sure you hear them.
As Margery’s raucous and ravishing visions of God begin to derail her life, she starts to attract more and more attention. And soon she’s on trial for heresy. But Margery won’t be quiet, and the visions won’t stop. In fact, they’re becoming more intense.
In this fast-paced, time travelling retelling of the autobiography of one of the Middle Age’s most incredible women, Margery takes to the stage to give us her life in her own words – tears and all.
- January 2024
Archie won’t use the lift. Lily draws on her Underground map. Everyone is afraid of heights and the future is vertical.
It is London between the wars and Archie and Lily have recently moved into one of the city’s first ‘skyscrapers’. Amongst the changing skyline, seen from above and traversed using the Underground network below, the two navigate an existence which places them increasingly further into the sky and deeper into the ground. 'Skylines' maps the attempts of ordinary people to come to terms with both the distance and closeness of their newly vertical lives and what it means to confront the future in a world where everything seems suspended.
- January 2024
What happens when you encounter an invention that could change the world? And who would you destroy to take control of it?
A Professor of linguistics, his prize PHD student and an ambitious computer science postgraduate wrestle for control of a new, logical language which will transform the way we communicate. Jamie Rycroft’s new play for Corkscrew Theatre explores both the current zeitgeist and the age-old human traits of ambition and greed. Let the games begin.
- January 2024
- December 2023
Set in 1997, over fifty years after the war that brought them together, three Special Operations Executive agents meet to record interviews for a television documentary investigating the murder of their colleague at the hands of the Gestapo.
As Leo, Vera and John wait to be interviewed in a beautiful English garden, drinking tea and doing the crossword, pleasantries give way to deeper darker subjects and a web of self-deception, lies and guilt begins to emerge.
Love, revenge and feelings of guilt are at the centre of this fascinating play and in an era when ‘alternative facts’ replace actual facts, we are reminded that the first victim of war is the truth.
- December 2023
- November–December 2023
Calling all intellects! The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is here, and simply aims to perform every single Shakespeare play (there’s 37 of them!) in 97 minutes.
This uproarious and highly physical sketch comedy takes the audience on a breath-taking and whiplash-inducing rollercoaster through all of the Bard’s magnificent plays, presenting them in a way you never have seen, or even imagined, them before. Importantly, the play is extremely spontaneous and appears to the audience as almost an improvisation. Mistakes are scripted, the fourth wall is demolished and there is fabulous audience participation. Wildly funny and with madcap actors running around, this show will be fantastic fun.
- November 2023
One tragic night, three separate accounts of the same story ... but which one is real, if any are at all? Witnesses are only human, and no matter how hard one tries, emotion and past experience will always cloud the way in which we remember. Inspired by the work of Frantic Assembly and Florian Zeller, this devised piece will take you on a creative journey of speech, physicality and technical exploration to venture in the less-well defined spaces of theatre in a truly unique performance.
https://www.instagram.com/lighthouse_corpus/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igshid=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
- November 2023
The Hair Shop is a play that shines a light on the black feminine experience.
It discusses the trials and tribulations that black British girls go through growing up in England, and the ways in which sisterhood and community aid them through it. These events mostly play out in The Hair Shop - a setting that is emblematic of the black feminine experience to so many.
The play enables a glimpse at experiences that are often lived quietly and redirects attention towards the struggles that are ignored. Whilst doing this, tension is alleviated by comedy and a beautiful friendship that lightens the mood of the play, showing how essential these relationships are to these communities.
- November 2023
- November 2023
https://www.instagram.com/almost.maine_corpus/
- November 2023
Another night, another new case…
There’s been a murder in town. Who? How? Where? That’s for you to decide!
Follow a hardboiled detective in this improvised noir murder mystery, as they meander, bluster and blunder their way through the case, and ultimately attempt to deduce the audience’s suggestions and solve the murder. Stake out seedy dive bars and stroll the perpetually rainy streets. Meet a rogues’ gallery of mobsters and mafiosos, crooked coppers and sleazy suits. Will our intrepid investigator crack the case and bring the perp to justice, or will the murderer successfully shift the blame and slip the noose?
- November 2023
- November 2023
Winner of CUADC's Playwriting Competition - Overall Winner
It’s commonplace: bombs go off at night and people disappear before dawn. None of that’s newsworthy. Everyday proceedings have their complications; some are fatal, some are more irritating. It’s a messy business - keeping the peace, controlling the masses, making sure everybody and everything is held on a tight leash.
Once, there were wars abroad. Now, there are wars at home. There’s fighting on the streets, and paperwork piling up on desks. These days money is scarce and food is scarcer. Any job is a job, if you keep your eyes and ears closed. And yet here we are: bringing love into a world of hate.
Cohen is a psychiatrist… was a psychiatrist. Now he needs a job. Soon, he will come face-to-face with a revolution, and a little too close with his past.
- November 2023
I resented you deeply. I trusted you beyond reason.
Dominic is a talented neurosurgeon, a devout Catholic, and a devoted husband to his wife Cathy, with whom he is expecting his first child. But his idealism is tested when he reunites with Emily, an old medical school colleague whose daughter Felicity has recently been diagnosed with cancer. As he oversees Felicity's case, Dom feels the carefully drawn lines between his personal and professional identities begin to dissolve. Doctor, parent, sceptic, patient – an operating theatre becomes a Church becomes a home. Where is that faith owed to a God and to a girl; to his family and to his patients — and where is that faith owed to himself?
