Artistic Director: Cynthia Marsh

Chairman: Tom Manuel / Philip Hogarth

Welcome

I am delighted to present the new season for 2013/14 to you. Exploring a large number of suggestions, tracking down plays, reading and discussing them has been an enriching experience for the Programme Advisory Group (aka PAG) which I have been privileged to chair. Our final choice  is driven by plays we shall enjoy bringing to you as our audience, and creating as actors, designers, directors and crew. As well as balancing numbers of male and female parts we range across comedy and plays of comment, history and thriller,  while not leaving out the experimental.  We hope you will enjoy our varied and contemporary programme.

You'll find laughter in God of Carnage, a contemporary, acutely observed comedy of manners, and in The Regina Monologues a modern take on Henry VIII's six wives; in Black Comedy, an hilarious exercise in farce, and in the darker comedy and comment of Happy Days, and Jerusalem. Join us for history: post-Suez Britain and the dying music hall in The Entertainer and, in Anne Boleyn, a provocative visit to Tudor and Stuart England.  Given 2014 is a centenary of WWI, you'll  find commemorative visits to the times in Rutherford and Son (1912) encapsulating industrial and family Britain on the eve of the great war; and  in Private Peaceful  a modern, touching recreation  of the fate of two young soldier brothers.

Do you enjoy a thrill? Try Ira Levin's Deathtrap a spooky and clever thriller, or the crime shorts evening with Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and the very new Little Dolls. Or if you think of theatre as experiment, there's an evening of Caryl Churchill whose new forms amuse and chill. Or  Beckett's evocative and provocative, Not I and Happy Days (two for the price of one here!).

And a Christmas show to delight the young and not so young, The Firebird takes you into the world of Russian fairy tales.

For even more variety, there is the production from our prize winning youth group, and a visit from our German friends from Karlsruhe. A packed season!

As well as our usual Friday Post-Performance Talkbacks, we also hope you will come to our free Wednesday post-show events. Watch our website for further details. Come along to the first, on 13 November, in the run of Anne Boleyn, on 'Creating Period Costume for the Theatre', presented by our wardrobe team.

For members, we are introducing four Sunday night play readings, as 'The Plays that Got Away', airing plays we just could not fit in. Details to come on the website. Come and have a go. The first will be 29 September starting at 7pm. Would you like to try directing? New directors, young and older, are encouraged to present a very short extract from any of the plays we read, at a festival planned for Sunday 13 July 2014.  Please contact me for further details.

Above all, enjoy the season!  We look forward to welcoming you.

- Cynthia Marsh, Artistic Director