- June 2017
A Dinner Engagement is this year's CUOS May Week Show, a colourful new take on Berkeley's very modern modern opera.
It's a frothy, delightful, 1950s tale of love amongst the vegetables. The sweet but butter-fingered Lord and Lady Dunmow are trying to prepare for dinner with the Grand Duchess and her son Phillipe. Currently in very reduced circumstances,they hope to marry their daughter to the minted Prince. But as the Very Rich try and navigate their genteel way through the impossible trial of making dinner, absolutely everything goes terribly wrong.
And yet, despite all the parental mayhem, the first buds of young love start to flourish...
- June 2017
And Then There Were None is one of Christie’s most successful murder mysteries and was adapted for stage by her in 1943. Ten strangers are invited by a mysterious host to a large holiday home on an island off the coast of Cornwall. All with unclean pasts they make their way to the house, still yet to meet the host when they arrive. Soon, one by one, they start to be killed off. All of them are victims, and all of them could be the murderer. It seems the host is playing games when he leaves a chilling voice recording condemning them all for various crimes and murders they have committed themselves. More sickening still is the nursery rhyme framed in every guest’s room listing the deaths of ‘Ten Little Soldiers’, and the ten little soldier figurines in the dining hall: every murdered guest sees another figurine go missing. When the last guest is murdered, who could the murderer possibly be?
- May 2017
you don't want to know about actors | actors are depressing
Budge and Wyatt sit in a hospital wing and watch things falling apart. The nurses are impostors, the doctors are frauds, and who exactly is Arno Klein? Why is there a man pretending to be a T.V?
Don DeLillo is our greatest living novelist, yet for too long the world has overlooked his plays. Don't make the same mistake. This black comedy, set in a hospital ward, is surreal, funny, awkwardly insightful, and most importantly, pretentious.
This play in Fitzpatrick Hall will create a theatre-in-the-round, for an experience not often provided in Cambridge. The space will be intimate, bizarre, and messy. Welcome to the day room.
- March 2017
Electra is the child of a broken family pretending it's still holding together. Her mother's lover has taken over the throne and become a tyrant, after her father's brutal murder at his hands. Her sister is weak and her brother has fled. She stands surrounded by blank smiling faces staring at her like masks. She hears the voices of strange people she isn't sure are real. One way or another, there's going to be blood.
- March 2017
Clara and Ben are ‘casually sleeping together’, caught up in a turbulent and destructive relationship, apparently devoid of love. Clara is distracted and distant. Ben is desperate to open her up and develop a closeness between them.
As the barriers between Clara and Ben break down, physical violence and violent love destine the couple for mutual destruction. Set on one rainy afternoon, the intimate bedroom exchange focuses on their unhealthy, habitual pattern and inability to communicate. But, their apparently meaningless and mundane conversation actually delves down into the core, and deeply affects each of them. Here, loneliness takes the form of love.
This play is a one-room drama that combines physical theatre with intense naturalism to portray the familiar struggle of Clara and Ben. With the stage and script both stripped bare: ‘Come Back to Bed’ is a performance of raw emotion and physicality, as two people are pushed to their limits.
- February 2017
"When you're between any kind of devil and the deep blue sea, the deep blue sea sometimes looks very inviting."
The play opens with Hester Collyer's first suicide attempt: originally written as a one-act play in which she was successful, Rattigan ultimately found it more appealing to explore the psyche of a person on the precipice of despair. Hester has left her well-off and kindly husband William in favour of the desirable yet emotionally reticent Freddie, and now finds herself trapped in a loveless relationship without an escape route. She cannot fathom going back to her husband but when Freddie forgets her birthday she can no longer cope with her current relationship. The only exit she sees is taking her own life but, after some bracing advice from the enigmatic and stoic Mr Miller, she finds herself willing to reconsider.
Rattigan's masterpiece and, in the words of Libby Purves, "a bit of a game-changer" when it is first seen or read, The Deep Blue Sea is a challenging and provocative play, encouraging social responsibility and taking an unsentimental but compassionate stance on mental health.
- November 2016
‘Merdre!’
The first performance of the first word of the first piece of absurdist theatre, when put on in Paris in 1896, resulted in a riot.
Before the start of the premiere Alfred Jarry walked onto the stage and said ‘You are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet – a school boy’s caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world.’
The play tells the story of the rise of Ubu Pa to the throne of Baloney and his eventual fall, in absurd mockery of everything from the bourgeois to Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.
A basement fever-dream, gutter rock, an anarchic farce, Berlin techno… This show really has it all. Wow.
- February 2016
Set in 1929 New York City, Bugsy Malone captures a flashy world of would-be hoodlums, showgirls, and dreamers. In this setting, two gangs prepare to take each other down, with Fat Sam and Dandy Dan competing to take control of the city. Bugsy Malone, a one-time boxer, is thrust not-so-willingly into the gangster limelight, when he becomes the last chance Fat Sam's gang has of surviving. All Bugsy really wants to do is spend time with his new love Blousey; but that just isn't on the cards for our hero just yet.
Great songs, amazing dances, flashing lights and cream-pie fights - what more could a musical have to offer?
- November 2015
'I've never understood
what it is I'm not supposed to feel
like a bird on the wing in a swollen sky my mind is torn by lightning
as it flies from the thunder behind'
This is not a play. This is a suicide note. This is the fragmented reality of a broken mind.
This is not the answer. This is the question. This is the opening line and the closing breath.
Sarah Kane's final and most personal work opens up the minds of three people suffering from depression, taking the audience on a journey into the deepest recesses of human suffering.
- November 2015
Jephtha was Handel's last oratorio, premièred in 1752. Like all Handel's 'Israelite' oratorios, it was originally presented in an entirely un-staged way, due to reasons stemming from the contemporary religious and aesthetic climate, but we are excited to follow the trend of Glyndebourne and WNO in presenting this oratorio in a fully staged production. Jephtha is intensely emotionally charged, and has the potential to be extremely affecting as a piece of theatre; the story is presented here in a stylised, eighteenth-century, imagined London.
- March 2015
Bernstein's 'Candide' is an operetta set in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in the mythical European land of Westphalia. Within these walls live the Baron and Baroness, Cunegonde-- their beautiful and innocent virgin daughter, Maximilian--their handsome son, Candide--their handsome bastard nephew, and Paquette-- the Baroness' buxom serving maid. They are taught by Dr. Pangloss, who preaches the philosophy that all is for the best in "The Best of All Possible Worlds."
Candide and Cunegonde kiss and Candide is banned from Westphalia. As he leaves, Bulgarians invade, kidnap him and slaughter everyone except for Cunegonde, who they prostitute out to a rich Jew and the Grand Inquisitor. Candide escapes and begins an optimistic, satirical journey...
For 'Candide', composer of 'West Side Story', Leonard Bernstein wrote thrilling music full of wonderful tunes. The show is great spectacle, performed by a large cast of thirty talented singers.
- November 2014
Lady Billows is organising the annual May Day festival and desperate to find girls for the coveted position of Queen of the May. However, it turns out none of the girls in the village are virgins – disqualifying them. Thus, Lady Billows and Superintendent Budd decide to select a May King instead of a May Queen. Albert Herring, a virgin, is the perfect candidate. He is crowned May King at the Fete. But, feeling ridiculed, jealous of his colleague, Sid’s relationship with Nancy and drunk from a spiked drink, he heads out into the wide world. The town assumes he is dead, and are deep in tragic mourning when Albert finally, and most comedically, returns to their great surprise and frustration!
- March 2014
"Then, since I am his Ganymede, let me be cut in stars, and set where jealous hate may never come"
Egypt. 130 AD. The emperor Hadrian, accompanied by his wife, court, and secretary, Suetonius, is on a diplomatic tour; all eyes are on Antinous, Hadrian's young lover and pin-up boy of the Classical world. As the party floats further down the Nile, the stage is set for tragedy.
"I have my wife's contempt, my friend's decease, and now my lover's enmity to weigh upon my soul: what is an empire to these cares?"
- November 2013
A group of young English cavaliers head to the Med for the mother of all hedonistic holidays, but they’ve more than met their match in the girls they encounter. Belvile thinks he’s found true love with Florinda, but an arranged marriage and a protective older brother stand in his way. Blunt thinks he’s found true lust with Lucetta, but he’s about to be given a rude awakening. Frederick just wants to find somebody, anybody. And Willmore, the rover, causes chaos wherever he goes, trailing broken hearts and broken bottles in his wake. Can this “rampant lion of the forest” be tamed? Or will events take a darker course?
- November 2013
Cambridge. 1986. Wracked by ambition and stress, and disillusioned with his studies, Faustus makes a deal. Knowledge, power, reputation - the price: his soul.
What would you give to have all the answers?
- March 2013
It is the year 500 BC. Rome is at war. In an army camp on the outskirts of the city, the Generals Collatinus and Junius have been drinking with the Etruscan Prince of Rome, Tarquinius. But whilst the men fight and drink, what are their wives up to? Earlier, some soldiers had been sent back to Rome to see whose wife had remained the most faithful, with disastrous results. Now as wine flows and tempers rise, the resentment towards Collatinus, the only one whose wife was loyal, begins to boil over. Collatinus' chaste and beautiful Lucretia is more of a temptation than the hot-blooded Tarquinius can stand. What follows is the deeply disturbing psychological portrait of Lucretia's downfall.
Double-Olivier award winning actress Samantha Spiro and Britten scholar and broadcaster Dr Kate Kennedy have come together to direct "The Rape of Lucretia" with a thrilling ensemble of Cambridge University's most talented young singers and musicians.
- March 2013
- February 2013
French Without Tears is a larger-than-life comedy about what it means to be young. When Commander Roger, grizzled Naval captain, arrives a school for young men attempting (and failing) to learn French, he sets of a tangled love affair involving the naive Kit, Alan the self-styled intellectual and Diana: the focus of their affections.
- December 2012
Join us at 4pm on Saturday, the 1st of December, in the Fitzpatrick Theatre, Queens' College. Suggested donation £5/£4 (concessions), all proceeds to charity!
ALADDIN - THE WOK AND ROLL PANTO. It's Chinese New Year, and in Old Tsing Tai the party's just getting started! But when Aladdin (a penniless peasant) falls in love with the Princess (whose father wants to marry her off to a powerful man with a powerful secret), it looks as though some magic powers might be needed to sort things out. With a full complement of "He's behind you"s, cross-dressing, and a dragon!
and
MAD SCIENCE. London, 1897. A week before Christmas... and the members of the Mad Science Club are far too busy competing for the first prize in the Grand Symposium to let the Christmas Spirit anywhere near their boiling flasks! Rivalry and back-biting reach new heights (and lows) in this group of famous mad scientists when Frankenstein's old lab project decides to team up with the technologically illiterate (but very rich) Count Dracula and the disgraced (formerly invisible) Dr Griffin to see if he can topple his mentor's reign at the top in this oddball Christmas comedy about mistletoe, manchildren and morgues.
- November 2012
Following a popular first Comedy Night last year, Queens' Charities Committee is proud to present their second annual Charity Comedy Night. Come along for great stand-up, hilarious sketches, and jaw-achingly funny performers, including some of Queens' own comedians. Tickets cost £5 on the door or can be reserved in advance by emailing lh427.
- November 2012
"I found god in myself/and I loved her/I loved her fiercely"
For Colored Girls is an explosively evocative and daringly innovative piece of drama from American poet Ntozake Shange.
Combining spoken word poetry, physical theatre, music and dance, Shange's choreo-poem gives a piercingly authentic look at urban life through the brash lens of beautifully unrefined poetry.
Following the lives of seven women identified solely by the colour of their clothing, the play tackles experiences of rape, domestic violence, infidelity and sisterhood, taking its characters and audience from a place of desolation to the liberating finale at the end of their rainbows.
A vibrant, lyrical and emotive piece of organic drama, For Colored Girls is a powerful social critique which simultaneously gives a uniquely polyphonic and authentically raw voice to universal experiences.
- November 2012
"Philip II has a new wife. And a new lover. But with jealous exes vowing revenge, allies conspiring against him, and his son - Alexander the Great - plotting to seize power, he won't stay happy long...
Blood, fire, sex, rhetoric and revenge; this monstrous creation will be unlike anything you've ever seen on a Cambridge stage."
- October–November 2012
- October–November 2012
‘in the vatican everything is confidential and nothing is secret’
Following the death of the Pope a man is elected who the cardinals believe can stop the spread of corruption in the Vatican. Thirty days later he is dead. No official investigation is launched, no autopsy is performed and cardinal Benelli watches as the press release is secretly distorted. Benelli has the power to ensure the death is properly investigated but only by surrendering his last chance of becoming pope. Years later, beyond justice, ambition and friendship all that remains is his last confession.
A thrilling tail of rivalry, intrigue and faith. The Last Confession takes us inside the Vatican to uncover the events surround the death of ‘the smiling pope’
- March 2012
DRAGON?! - Dung shovellers, hockey players, policemen, a grumpy professor, a sorceress named Chlamydia, and a very large red dragon. Will Seth accept his Destiny, or will everyone get burned to cinders?
CLUEDO - The PANTOMIME - Was it Mrs Peacock in the Library with the dagger? Was it Professor Plum in the Study with the candlestick? Was it Mrs White in the Ballroom with the...pantomime piano...?
- March 2012
The BATS Freshers' Show takes on one of the most celebrated works of twentieth century theatre, Caryl Churchill's warts-and-all portrayal of the working woman, and what it takes to be one. Marlene has been promoted to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency and is lauded by women past and present as a successful, admirable female. But how much has she given up for her career? Her family? Her credibility? Even her gender?
- March 2012
Two men, two women. Sex, betrayal, half-truth, and that's just the bubbly first half. Rose has just moved into Cassie's spare room.She believes in horoscopes, leprechauns and numerology, which doesn't go down well with Cassie, who lobbies parliament to raise awareness of rape and gender inequality. They met on gumtree. Rose thinks Mark is the one, Mark's fairly sure he isn't. Tim lives with Mark. He is recently bereaved, fat and doesn't know what to do. So far, so good. But what seems like a romcom waiting to happen quickly curdles into something much, much nastier.
Set up as a sparky metropolitan comedy of manners, Penelope Skinner's divisive script delves deeply into the dark underbelly of modern romance, starkly depicting emotional manipulation, sexual humiliation and near-total self-destruction. An intoxicating mix of comedy and tragedy, 'Eigengrau' tenderly examines the alienation of modern life and the near-impossibility of living as a feminist in a world that believes the struggle is over.
- February 2012
The CU Show Choir returns to the stage with an all-new selection of the best songs from the most beloved movies, musicals and TV shows of all time. Our singers and orchestra will leave you dazzled with their boundless enthusiasm, talent and showmanship.
- February 2012
When Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to track down Richard Greenleaf, the errant son of a wealthy American couple, his mission takes on a sinister twist as their lives become inextricably entwined. Phyllis Nagy’s stage adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ explores the mind of one of crime fiction’s great anti-heroes; an intelligent, suave, and charming psychopath whose amorality is at the centre of a plot about duplicity and murder.
- November 2011
- November 2011
Combine the best restaurant in London and the worst diners in the world and what do you get? Madness. Add into the mix a verbose restaurant manager, a namedropping waiter, and a pseudo-sexually charged waitress, and Pinter’s Celebration is a feast of bizarre comedy not to be missed. Join us for this one-act play from perhaps Britain’s most revered and versatile playwright, and take the opportunity to explore his final work in all its comedic, dramatic and intensely strange glory.
- November 2011
It's the 2503th performance of "Oedipus Tyrannus" and Chorus 6 wants to call it quits. The tragic hero, however, isn't quite ready to end the performance. Can a plot be altered, can a well-known story be changed? The minor actors are determined to escape a theatrical prison... but the protagonist has other ideas.
BATS is proud to present this imaginative new adaptation of the Oedipus myth.
- November 2011
Sondheim’s musical thriller, a modern day classic, tells the story of Benjamin Barker. Framed by the evil Judge Turpin him - in order to rape Barker's wife - he escapes and returns to London only to discover his wife poisoned herself and Turpin is to marry his daughter. He rents a room over Mrs Lovett’s struggling pie shop, selling - to quote - “The Worst Pies in London”, and plots revenge, which soon expands to include a much wider clientele.
Sweeney Todd deftly mixes horror with the blackest humour. A cast of Cambridge's finest actor-singers will appear in a brand new production that will be mesmerising, disconcerting and bloody good fun.
Sweeney's waiting.
- March 2011
When no heroes are left, who will save us?
Fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe 2010, the Medics’ Revue is back, bringing ‘The Fantastic Forceps’ to the Fitzpatrick Hall and providing an hour of riotous sketches and hilarious songs that are sure to tickle your funny bone. Featuring entirely original, and specifically non-medical humour from the pens of undergraduate medics and vets, this show continues to be a well-loved Cambridge tradition. Drawing upon current affairs, pop culture and the twisted imaginations of the next generation of lifesavers, the show promises to provide light-hearted entertainment as a perfect antidote to the end of term. Medics’ Revue promises to split your sides, and then stitch them back up again after!
- March 2011
The world's greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, another who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game, with the world as the stake? For Mobius has uncovered the mystery of the universe--and therefore the key to its destruction--and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the earth.
- February 2011
Running to 4 star reviews last term (‘a masterpiece of madness’, TCS), BATS revives ‘William Fergus Stuart’ as their week 4 lateshow. Attempting to tell the story of its author’s life, the show explores and explodes autobiography, going after war, life, death, romance and struggling to find your heart.
