- November 2006
- November 2006
Beverly is bored and brash, overbearing and overly-confident; and she has decided to throw a party…
Excluded from Abigail’s party, the hostess, her husband and guests spend the evening chez Beverly, surrounded by 1970s domestic must-haves, décor and music. Over G&Ts and “cheese on sticks” a savagely funny study of pretentious middle-class manners evolves. Mike Leigh’s perceptive dialogue and eye for social mores construct a time bomb of emotional tension. At times hilarious, at others squeamishly awkward, always engrossing; don’t miss this opportunity to see one of Leigh’s best loved plays brought to life at the Corpus Playroom.
- November 2006
Two one-act comedies by the British playwright Tom Stoppard (who wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love) full of marital infidelity and sweet revenge. Two lesser-known plays, they display Stoppard’s genius for visual comedy and verbal wit. 'Another Moon Called Earth', set in an alternate reality where British Astronauts have succeeded in landing on the moon first, incorporates death, mysterious illness and philosophical endeavour while 'Teeth' demonstrates that affairs with the dentist's wife are bound to lead to trouble – “All round him there are smiles like broken-down brooms.”
- October–November 2006
A new translation by Ade O'Brien, promises to be the best Chekhov production this year. Bringing the rich and youthful humour of the piece to the forefront, the production is both uplifting comedy and an intimate tragedy.
- October 2006
‘Oh what a jolly family.’ Edward Albee’s caustic and cautionary play thrusts the audience to the empty soul of the prettily packaged American Dream. In a soulless apartment, domineering Mommy and sexless Daddy live with Grandma, whose senility makes her saner than the puppets of married life playing around her. The ‘unexpected’ visit of voracious and hypocritical do-gooder Mrs Barker reveals some deeply grotesque home truths. Yet the absurd emotional violence is delicately wrapped in the alluring shine of comedy, mirroring the disturbingly vacuous Mommy and Daddy’s attempts to claw onto the sheen and dazzling semblance of wholesome American ideals.
- October 2006
One of the most reknown authors of the mid-twentieth century has written this harrowing tragedy about a young girl who falls in love with an older, married man. Upon the death of her parents she moves in with two maiden aunts and an uncle who is a crippled priest. The passion of her love cannot be disguised for long in such surroundings. The affair is thrown into the open in a blistering scene. The girl does not feel that loving the man of her life is in any way wrong or indecent, but each episode in the closing plot leads her deeper and deeper into an inextricable situation. Finally, the wife of the man comes to see the young girl, and the tragic circle is completed. The girl struggles fiercely against all the forces within her and without, until she is entirely overwhelmed by the descending tragedy.
- October 2006
Two young men arrive at the end of the line. As the last train slips away forever, they are faced with the universal predicament of choice. Should we regret or be happy with our past? Were the choices we’ve made the right ones? And most importantly: how should we spend the last few moments of our lives? ‘Untimely Figs’ is a piercing and rapid new piece of writing which explores mortality with both humour and tragedy. It is a drama that any audience will feel themselves being drawn into emotionally and philosophically. Performed in ‘real-time’, the Corpus Playroom becomes a ticking bomb as we watch an unrelenting clock count down to the last second. Will they find the ‘right way’ to end?’
- September 2006
Dramas on stage and off in a beleaguered comprehensive. High quality small-scale theatre from Cambridge's vibrant new Horseshoe Theatre Company, following sell-out runs of 'Yerma' and 'An Inspector Calls'.
- May 2006
Making Space brings you the best of new writing for the Corpus Playroom. In four new short plays which take their inspiration from ideas in literature, film and music, dystopian worlds, backpackers, courtesans and a college Head Porter jostle for the audience's attention. Be prepared to laugh and to cry in a romp through the Cambridge imagination. Space is Made.
- May 2006
White lie or brown nose? Back-slapping fun or backbiting hate? Plain talking - or just plain stupid? Honesty? Or tyranny?
You're not mad just because you're a minority of one. But sometimes you are anyway. Molière's Misanthrope is a self-proclaimed misfit, waging war on the dishonesty he sees around himself in society, despite being totally smitten with the queen bee of his social circle. This production transfers the bitchiness, sexual intrigues and self-righteous social protest of the original to a modern university context whilst retaining the text of one of the greatest verse comedies in the canon. Get mad! Pull hair! Tear sonnets to pieces! Do the hoovering! All in French! This isn't just war. This is misanthropy.
Performed in French with English surtitles.
- March 2006
- March 2006
The traditional power structures of both the theatre and the bedroom are called into question as three women live their lives and play their games. Sexuality and its repressions and expressions, and the politics of everyday life find voice in this devised production where the inadequacy of the status-quo must be met head on.
- February–March 2006
- February–March 2006
- February 2006
How do we love someone who falls outside the moral code? Harry and Nan are a couple whose marriage has become a comfortable back drop for witty remarks and infidelity. However, this relationship is tested when their 39 year old son Isaac returns home seeking refuge from his own terrifying feelings towards someone he is forbidden to love. Harry and Nan search for clues, desperate to make sense of this horror, alternately looking for exoneration and punishment for what must be their fault. They want to love him. But they don't know how.
- February 2006
'The Father' is one of Strindberg's most aggressive works; it relates a feverish nightmare of the struggle Strindberg saw between defiant masculinity and the treacherous weakness of women. The play is a stark portrayal of a bitter domestic battle.
- February 2006
Set in the trenches of the First World War, Journey's End follows the lives of a group of British officers in the run up to a major offensive. Raleigh, an 18 year old fresh out of public school is full of heroric ideas and enthusiasm to join the war effort. This is met with the brutality of trench life when he confronts his former school cricketing hero, the captain of the battalion, and witnesses first hand the cold reality of the destruction of war upon human nature.
Whilst poignant, the play demonstrates the heartwarming strength of human relationships under the most testing of conditions, portraying moments of tenderness, sensitivity, anger, desperation, self destruction and humour.
"Then we all go west in the big attack - and she goes on thinking I'm a fine fellow for ever - and ever - and ever"
- February 2006
What if beauty wasn't a gift? What if radiance was a disease? 'The Drowned World' is one of the most exciting plays of the 21st century and explores a dystopian future where the 'cowardly,' and 'graceless' rule, and where the eradication of beauty is their goal. 'The Drowned World' addresses questions about the nature of persecution, torture and living in an authoritarian state. But at the same time, it is personal, questioning whether love and humanity can survive in extreme circumstances.
Written in 2002, Gary Owen's play won the George Devine award and a Fringe First. 'The Drowned World' promises to be a stunning and unmissable piece of theatre.
- February 2006
- February 2006
The Fletcher Players present...
'A Taste of Honey' by Shelagh Delaney, Week 3 in the Corpus Playroom
'A Taste of Honey' created a stir in 1950s British theatre and society with its frank discussion of teenage pregnancy, racial prejudice and homosexuality. Set in a bedsit in Northern England, 17 year old Jo is forced into premature adulthood by her alcoholic mother and an unwanted pregnancy. In a poignant exploration of 'the outsider', we follow Jo's search for intimacy as she turns to other, socially ostracised, individuals, who helpher to reconstruct her shattered life.
I am looking for actors who are interested in working on a challenging production, which I am updating for the modern generation. The play requires sensitive actors who are eager to explore the individual's struggles against the social prejudices of our time.
- January–February 2006
'We've got the scenery, we've got the costumes, we could put on proper shows - history's always popular, and there's enough stuff in Henry IV for several tragedies.'
An old man falls from his horse during a pageant. When he comes round, he believes he's the medieval German Emperor, King Henry IV. For twenty years, he lives royally in a castle in the air, the characters onstage playing parts in the fantasy.
But today, a plan is being hatched to shock him out of this 'insanity' and into the twenty-first century. However, just like the Doctor, we start to question how mad this king really is: where does illusion end and delusion begin?
- January 2006
It's all over. Jerry's five-year affair with his best friend's wife has been discovered and his life lies in ruins. But what made him start on the road to self-destruction? In Betrayal, Nobel-laureate Harold Pinter takes us from the end of the affair to its beginning, chronicling the petty deceptions that accumulate to destroy three lives. Beneath their conversation lies a dark subtext that is always threatening to break the surface and shatter their complacency.
Visit www.robertandme.co.uk
- December 2005
101 years after their first publication, the ghost stories of M R James can still send a shiver down the spine. Now Nunkie Theatre Company are bringing two of the eeriest and most entertaining back to life - hard by the very places where they were originally conceived and performed.
In 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-book', a Cambridge antiquary discovers the dark sie of the manuscript illumination, in a medieval town in the French Pyrenees....
In 'The Mezzotint' a ghoulish revenge is enacted within a work of art, before the helpless eyes of a museum curator....
'A Pleasing Terror' will be performed in two venues closely associated with the author. The beautiful and atmospheric Founder's Library of the Fitzwilliam would have been James' office when he was Director of the Musuem. The public will have a rare chance to judge for themselves how fr the dark corners and book-lined walls of this marvellous interior may have influenced his supernatural fiction.
The Corpus Playroom is within sight of King's College, where James spent much of his life and where he first performed the stories to friends at Christmas - friends who doubtless smiled, but who also perhaps shifted a little uneasily in their seats as the strange don pursued his singular hobby of 'inspiring a pleasing terror....'
- November–December 2005
'PAPER FLOWERS' is a tight two-hander, written in 1969 (the year the Communist leader Allende, came to power) by one of Chile’s greatest living playwrights explores the gulf between ‘Los Rotos’ (the broken ones) and the repetitive life of the affluent middle classes. The play is constructed with exceptional skill and is a sophisticated fusion of magical realism, absurdism and black comedy. I’m looking for two committed and open minded actors who wish to challenge themselves and enjoy exploring these two complicated and intriguing characters. Together we will make creative use the rehearsal process to produce a piece of theatre which does justice to the play’s unique and exciting explosion of longing, power games, silence, humour and desperation.
ROLES:
EVA: A lonely middle class widow who paints flowers alone in the botanical gardens. She tries with all her might to reach out and offer her love to Beto, a man whom she finds both socially and sexually threatening and compelling. When we first meet her, her life is ordered, repetitive and empty:
“That’s what my life is, eating and more eating, morning noon and night. I sometimes think that life is nothing more than a permanent meal, with pauses in between to get bored again”
BETO: An enigmatic figure from the slums by the river; dressed in rags, prone to severe fits of shaking and a disarming ability to evade questions about his past. He is a forceful presence, often fluctuating between monotonous utterances, brutality, childlike pathos and intensely poetic speeches:
“Love is broken bridge, with a broken tooth, with a broken crank. It flies within the world’s four walls, cracking skulls. Love is a three legged dog! A tramp with one hand and two bananas!”
The action is set in Eva’s ordered and neat living room, beginning as she enters with Beto carrying her shopping. What unfolds spans a tense few days in the house where we see Beto gradually colonise Eva’s world and impose disorder and havoc: rearranging, reconstructing and destroying the furniture and gradually filling the room with his dark, enormous, ragged paper flowers.
- November 2005
Down in Flames Theatre Company and Clare Actors present LOST FOR WORDS 22nd - 26th November, Corpus Playroom, 9.30pm. Box Office: 01223 503 333
‘The books he keeps are old now, and too tired to be anything other than domesticated. He runs his fingers down their spines, lavishing each with love…’
Warren Pale is a writer who does not write; either he cannot, or does not, or prefers not to. ‘Lost for Words’ is a symphony of moods and moments captured in Warren’s intense reflection, departing from the methods of the Stanislavskian stage in order to capture and distil instants as they happen. Assailed by the attentions of a paying audience, Warren will be taken apart and studied for significance.
Using the intimate stagespace of the Corpus Playroom, Down in Flames Theatre Company have created a threadbare mesh of worlds, brought to life through the efforts of the actors. ‘Lost for Words’ promises to be a work entirely different to anything else in Cambridge: lit by anglepoise lamps, actors are annihilated and characters let loose in their place.
If you want a show that’s original and trying new things in an exciting and unpretentious way, give this a try. ‘Lost for Words’ will be appearing at the Corpus Playroom 22nd-26th November, 9.30pm. Tickets £5.50, £4 concessions.
http://downinflamestheatre.com
- November 2005
Marlene hosts a dinner part in a London restaurant to celebrate her promotion to managing director of 'Top Girls' employment agency. Her guests are five women from the past: Isabella Bird - the adventurous traveller; Lady Nijo - the mediaeval courtesan who became a Buddhist nun and travelled on foot through Japan; Dull Gret, who as Dulle Griet in a Bruegel painting, led a crowd of women on a charge through hell; Pope Joan - the ninth-century female pope; and Patient Griselda, the obedient wife from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. As the evening unfolds we become intimately involved with the stories of these five women and begin to see the impending crisis in Marlene's own life. A classic piece of twentieth century theatre, Churchill's play explores the idea of what it is to be a woman – and a successful one at that – in a man’s world.
- November 2005
A 2002 Tony award winner for best play, 'The Goat' is Albee's most daring and provocative play since 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'. It tells the story of Martin, a world-famous architect whose seemingly ideal life is left in tatters following the revelation that he's having an affair....with a goat. Shocking, moving and hysterically funny, 'The Goat' makes the audience re-examine their notions of acceptable love.
'Every civilisation sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances... It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid' Edward Albee
- November 2005
Set in 19th Century Russia, THE CHERRY ORCHARD is both a searching social drama and an affectionate family portrait. It depicts the life of a once-rich land-owning family in a changing world. The cherry orchard itself becomes a symbol of the past that the family continue to cling to: once beautiful and distinguished, but now redundant and sacrificed to the forces of the social and economic change.
- November 2005
Terry is waiting. Always waiting. But what is he waiting for? Happiness? Satisfaction? Death? Trapped in the 'perspex purgatory' of an airport waiting lounge he waits, confronted by strangers who stop him from doing what he wants to do - be alone. This new play seeks to examine what we mean by fear and loss through a series of seemingly meaningless conversations. Everyone discovers a secret, but only the audience know the truth.
- November 2005
A very black comedy about comedy, and the people who watch it. A comedian dies. Two marriages collapse. There's a massive food fight.
An exhilarating, award-winning custard-pie tragedy from the author of The Graduate and Hitchcock Blonde, Dead Funny pushes the frontiers of farce into areas of real pain.
And it's dead funny.
- November 2005
'Orgy' is a shocking masterpiece by Italian filmmaker and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo, the Gospel According to Matthew) that lays bare the seedy underside of middle-class existence.
- November 2005
Entering an empty house after an extended honeymoon with her mediocre husband, Hedda Gabler struggles with a life that is devoid of excitement and beauty. Unfulfilled by her marriage, she strives to find an escape from the conventional, stifling domesticity in which she finds herself. Her manipulation of men and disdain for traditional feminine values only lead Hedda to violence and tragedy.
- October 2005
Forget all the other Shakespeare shows you’ll see this term – the Fletcher Players are proud to present his finest female character, Lady Macbeth. Well, when we say Lady Macbeth we mean Lily Morgan. Plain old Lily doesn’t just want to audition for the role in her school play, she wants to be Lady Macbeth. Will her friends and family ever see Lily as anything other than quiet and uninspiring? And what will bringing her brother’s knife to the audition lead to? After all it’s only acting – isn’t it?
- October 2005
The play tells the story of Jack, a proud Yorkshire miner and his long-suffering wife Liz, who, every September go to Blackpool for their holidays. As they look back over their lives during their final holiday, Jack and Liz remember Blackpool’s heyday of the 1950’s and 60’s creating a nostalgic, bittersweet comedy which is sure to evoke happy memories of family holidays by the seaside in a celebration of donkey rides and deckchairs, sun cream and sandcastles and of course, the good old British weather!
- October 2005
A story of two brothers and the tramp who comes to stay, The Caretaker is the most important play of one of the twentieth century's most important playwrights. This is a mysterious, obliquely comic and utterly unforgettable account of Aston, Mick, Davies, and the room that becomes their shelter and their prison.
The Caretaker perpetuated a theatrical revolution on its opening almost half a century ago and now three of Cambridge's finest actors make a fresh exploration into a modern masterpiece that terrifies, moves and delights all at the same time.
- September 2005
Returning victorious from war, Don Pedro and his officers arrive at the English country home of Leonato, totally unprepared for the scheming, sex and celebration to come. Their rest and relaxation is ruined by beautiful daughters, and jealous, wicked half-brothers, as new passions are born, old flames are re-ignited and plans are made for both marriage and mischief.
With an occasional cricket match, afternoon tea on the lawn and perhaps even jazz, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is a witty whirlwind of love and hate, tragedy and happy endings, teaching us that in the “merry war” of the sexes, no-one is safe from Cupid’s darts.
Hailing from the land of Shakespeare and cricket, this slick and professional true-to-life production is guaranteed to leave you mesmerized and yearning for those lazy sunny afternoons.
