DATES

SHOW

VENUE

20 Sep 2021
to
25 Sep 2021

How to Date a Feminist
by Samantha Ellis

Auditorium

A comedy that riffs on the Hollywood romcom as it explores the difficulties of finding true love amidst the complexities of modern dating etiquette and gender roles. It was first performed at the Arcola Theatre, London, on 6 September 2016.

18 Oct 2021

to

23 Oct 2021

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
by Peter Nicholls

Auditorium

First performed in 1967, and still relevant, the play centres on a couple who are struggling to save their marriage whilst trying to raise their only child, a girl who suffers with cerebral palsy and is unable to communicate. Caring for her has occupied nearly every moment of her parents' lives since her birth, taking a heavy toll on their marriage. A recent West End revival starred Toby Stephens, Claire Skinner and Patricia Hodge.

15 Nov 2021
to
20 Nov 2021

Pink Mist
by Owen Sheers

Auditorium

Pink Mist is a verse-drama about three young soldiers from Bristol who are deployed to Afghanistan. Within a short space of time they return to the women in their lives (a mother, a wife, a girlfriend), all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of their service. Drawing upon interviews with soldiers and their families, it is the first extended lyric narrative to emerge from the devastating conflict.

13 Dec 2021
to
18 Dec 2021

How the Other Half Loves

by Alan Ayckbourn

Auditorium

Familiar Ayckbourn themes of dysfunctional couples embarking upon disastrous relationships in a polite suburban setting. The main reason this early play (it was Ayckbourn’s second great success) is not performed more often is the challenge of staging it - one scene consists of two dinner parties taking place on stage simultaneously, with one hapless couple involved in both! Done successfully, it should be riotously funny.

10 Jan 2022
to
15 Jan 2022

How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found
by Fin Kennedy

Auditorium

Marketing executive Charlie is suffering from the pressures of his stressful lifestyle: insomnia, drink and drug abuse, panic attacks, mounting debts, and the recent death of his mother. When he is caught trying to make some money disappear, Charlie pulls a disappearing act of his own – running from the office, leaving the city, abandoning his life and his identity.

7 Feb 2022
to
12 Feb 2022

The Elephant Man

by Bernard Pomerance

Auditorium

First performed at the Hampstead Theatre in 1977, and then with successful runs at the National; and on Broadway and winner og the Tony Award for best new play.  Based on the story of Joseph Merrick (renamed John in the play) and his attempts to be treated as an ordinary person instead of an exhibit at a freak show, it raises important questions about what we consider “normal” and how we respond to people who don’t fit society’s norms.

7 Mar 2022
to
12 Mar 2022

Queen Anne
by Helen Edmundson

Auditorium

Period dramas have been popular in the last few seasons (a good opportunity to display costumes and wigs!) but this is rather less comic than some. The period and central character have recently become familiar through the film The Favourite; Edmundson’s play, first performed by the RSC in 2015, takes a different angle on the Queen’s relationship with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Like all good historical pieces, it raises key questions about political power at any time, including today.

4 Apr 2022
to
9 Apr 2022

Youth Theatre Show TBC

Auditorium

TBC

11 Apr 2022
to
16 Apr 2022

German Visit Shows TBC

Auditorium

TBC

9 May 2022
to
14 May 2022

Pressure
by David Haig

Auditorium

David Haig is perhaps best known as an actor and the writer of the powerful WW1 drama, My Boy Jack. Here he dramatises the previously almost unknown background to the D-Day landings, why the original date of the invasion had to be postponed because of bad weather. Needless to say, the word “pressure” takes on multiple significance and the play asks important questions about how much the fate of millions might depend on one person’s decision. Extracts were performed at Portsmouth on 5 June 2019 for the Queen, President Trump and other world leaders, to help mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

23 May 2022
to
28 May 2022

Hang
by Debbie Tucker Green

Studio

Cataclysm in a small space. Explosion in lower case. Intensity and obliqueness are defining marks of Debbie Tucker Green’s plays. As is a lack of capital letters. At some indefinite point in the future, a victim of an unnamed crime is meeting a pair of officials. They will allow her to help decide how the person who has harmed her family will be punished – actually, how the perpetrator will be killed.

13 Jun 2022
to
18 Jun 2022

Jekyll and Hyde
by Evan Placey

Auditorium

A radical re-imagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 gothic novella, commissioned by the National Youth Theatre and first performed in September 2017. The play opens in the Victorian period, after the death of Dr Jekyll (the culminating event in Stevenson's novella). Jekyll's widow, Harriet, is trying to continue her late husband's work, which results in her developing an alter ego as a violent, forthright prostitute, Flossie Hyde.  But all isn’t what it seems, and the plot (and period of action) takes a surprising and violent twist at the end of Act 1.

27 Jun 2022
to
2 Jul 2022

Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen

Studio

Richard Eyre’s version of Ibsen is true to the original while stripping down some of the more verbose passages. The result is a tense, ultimately tragic drama of a woman who has spent her life suspended in an emotional void after the death of her cruel but outwardly charming husband. She is determined to escape the ghosts of her past by telling her son, Oswald, the truth about his father, but finds his legacy impossible to escape. 'Raw and unsparing, but also devastatingly true to the spirit of the original... theatre seldom, if ever, comes greater than this' was the Sunday Telegraph’s review of its 2013 premiere.

18 Jul 2022
to
23 Jul 2022

People
by Alan Bennett

Auditorium

First staged at the National Theatre in 2012, Bennett’s play centres on a crumbling stately home that its elderly, aristocratic, owners are being forced to sell as they can no longer maintain it. The National Trust is the obvious buyer … until a more lucrative but morally dubious offer comes along. Like much of Bennett’s work, there is a metaphor for the state of the nation hovering behind the satire, which in this case is directed at the heritage industry and the value of so-called national treasures.