The year is 1913 and war with Germany is imminent Rudyard Kipling is at the peak of his literary fame. Due to very week eyesight, Kipling’s son Jack is unable to enlist in the army or navy. Using his influence, Kipling is able to find Jack a commission in the British Guards. A bitter family conflict is sparked when Jack is reported missing in action.
Type: Drama
Audience Target: Age 12+, coarse language, adult themes, depictions of war
Run Time: 2 Hours, 20 Minutes
Anna Patterson, the matriarch of a brood of famous and longing to be famous creative artists, has gathered the family to her summer house during the Williamstown Theatre Festival. But restless egos and remaining jealousies derail the weekend.
Type: Comedy Drama
Audience Target: Age 12+, Mild adult themes, coarse language
Run Time: 2 Hours, 20 Minutes
Clarissa, the second wife of Henry Hailsham Brown, is adept at spinning tales of adventure for their bored diplomatic circle. When a murder takes place in her drawing room she finds the drama much harder to cope with, especially as she suspects the murderer might be her young stepdaughter Pippa. Worse still, the victim is the man who broke up Henry’s first marriage! Clarissa’s fast talking places her in some hair raising experiences, as she comes to learn that the facts are much more terrifying than fiction…
“Suspense, anyone? The old fashioned kind? Who’s for good, clean fun? One is Agatha Christle’s 1954 puzzler, The Spider’s Web.” – Howard Thompson, The New York Times
A picture of a moment that is immortal in history!
This visually stunning play about Joan of Arc tells this simple girl’s story from two points of view. One of them is how we now look at this tale as a piece of history, knowledgeable of how Joan’s blundering captors unwittingly created a martyr who became forever a symbol of courage and faith. The other viewpoint has been to try to imagine what it must have been like to have been Joan herself. Divorcing it from the confinements of time, sequence and space, the story moves backward or forward without a jar. It begins with her trial and her tale of the voices that set her forth to save France from the English.
A modern dress version of the perennial favourite!
Henry II of England has had three sons by Eleanor of Aquitane – Richard, Geoffrey and John. He wants to keep the kingdom together after his death, but since all three want to rule, it is likely to be torn apart by revolution. Divorced wife Eleanor is invited for Christmas in hopes that succession plans may be defined. But Henry favours the youngest while Eleanor promotes the eldest, leaving Geoffrey to play both ends against the middle and hopefully come out on top. This matchless king and queen give us an evening of barbed humour and repeated thrusts of delight.
One of the funniest plays ever written!
Things begin to go awry when Victor Emmanuel Chandebise, a middle-class insurance salesman, becomes impotent, leading his wife, Raymonde, to assume that he has taken a mistress. To test his fidelity, she has her friend Lucille write an anonymous letter to Victor claiming to be infatuated with him and proposing a rendezvous at a notorious hotel. Thinking a mistake has been made, he sends his friend Tournel, a famous womanizer, to keep the appointment, after which the complications multiply uproariously! Things are somehow untangled and set right, but not until we have encountered several interesting characters all tumbled together in a medley of slamming doors, revolving beds, and wildly amiss gunshots – all of which leave audiences happily breathless from laughter!
Winner of the Drama Critics’ Award for the best new American play of the season
During World War II, Joe Keller and Herbert Deever ran a machine shop which sold aeroplane parts. Deever was sent to prison because the firm turned out defective parts, causing the deaths of many men. Keller went free and made a great deal of money. The love affair of Chris Keller and Ann Deever, the bitterness of George Deever, returned from the war to find his father in prison and his father’s partner free, are set in a structure of almost unbearable power. The climax, showing the reaction of a son to his guilty father, is a fitting conclusion to a play electrifying in its intensity.
An evening of sheer entertainment!
This is the Noel Coward of the 1930s at his inimitable best – gay, debonair, infinitely sophisticated! This style won him international reputation as the most successful purvery of high comedy in the present day theatre. The story is a frothy nothing, but Coward’s treatment of it is a continuously amusing two hours, highlighted by moments of insane hilarity! Julia and Jane, best friends and both happily married for five years, have both had brief premarital affairs with Maurice, a great French charmer. Now Maurice is visiting London and has asked to see them both. The husbands are away for a day of golf, and Julia and Jane nervously await Maurice’s call…
