Shows
Shows Past and Present
Agatha Christie's THE MOUSETRAP - Oct/Nov 2019
A group of strangers is stranded in a boarding house during a snow storm, one of whom is a murderer. The suspects include the newly married couple who run the house, and the suspicions in their minds nearly wreck their perfect marriage. Others are a spinster with a curious background, an architect who seems better equipped to be a chef, a retired Army major, a strange little man who claims his car has overturned in a drift, and a jurist who makes life miserable for everyone. Into their midst comes a policeman, traveling on skis. He no sooner arrives, when the jurist is killed. Two down, and one to go. To get to the rationale of the murderer's pattern, the policeman probes the background of everyone present, and rattles a lot of skeletons....!
Director - Ilya Parenteau
Mollie Ralston - Rosie Thorpe
Giles Ralston - Mike McAlpine
Sergeant Trotter - Devon Nickel
Christopher Wren - James M.Atkins
Miss Casewell - Anaïs Dahl
Mr Paravicini - Tom Zahner
Mrs Boyle - Sue Bonney-Cox
Major Metcalf - Roger Reade
Voice on the Radio - Tony Dunham
Stage Manager - Claudia Agster
Costume - Liz Manning
Marketing - Erika Levy
Edward Albee's THE ZOO STORY - March 2019
Peter, an average American, to escape his wife, two daughters and two parakeets sits on a bench in Central Park, reading and thinking. He is confronted by Jerry, a lonely man from the wrong side of the park, who tries to teach Peter the realities of life which Peter has tried to ignore. Through a serious of failed conversations and misinterpretations, Jerry begins an experiment to see if middle class Americans are animals after all....
THE ENSEMBLE
Director - Ilya Parenteau
Jerry - Oleg Karpenko
Peter - Tom Zahner
Set Design - Angela Lorenz
Costume - Liz Manning
THE ODD COUPLE by Neil Simon - December 2018 / January 2019
This classic comedy opens as a group of the guys assemble for cards in the apartment of divorced Oscar Madison. And if the mess is any indication, it's no wonder that his wife left him. Late to arrive is Felix Unger, who has just been separated from his wife. Fastidious, depressed, and none too tense, Felix seems suicidal, but as the action unfolds, Oscar becomes the one with murder on his mind when the clean freak and the slob ultimately decide to room together with hilarious results as The Odd Couple is born!
THE ENSEMBLE
Director - Ilya Parenteau
Oscar Madison - Tom Zahner
Felix Ungar - Mike McAlpine
Speed - Japheth Myers
Murray - Malcolm Giles
Roy - James Bunyon
Vinnie - James M. Atkins
Gwendolyn Pigeon - Lara Schitto
Gwendolyn Pigeon (10th December show) - Ellie Nias
Cecily Pigeon - Rosie Thorpe
THE CHESS PLAYER by Richard McElvain - September 2018
The Chess Player is based on the novella, “Schachnovelle” by Austrian author Stefan Zweig. It tells the story of a Viennese Jewish lawyer, Dr. B, imprisoned by the Nazis. Because his legal practice was in financial management for Austrian "old money", they are sure he "knows" things they want to find out, so instead of sending him to the death camps, they keep him in solitary confinement to break him down. Gradually descending into madness, he steals a book of famous chess games and staves off insanity by escaping into the games.
Beyond the story of survival, the production has a larger, meta-theatre frame in which Richard explores the idea of how life parallels the action of the play. How, like the doctor in solitary survives by entering an illusion, so do we in our lives reach out to illusions to guide us...like Theatre.
Richard performed the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and it received 5* STAR reviews!
…an absolute must see not only for entertainment purposes, but as a necessary piece of theatre.
Broadway Baby *****
SOME GIRL(S) by Neil LaBute - April 2018
Your Career as a writer is blossoming, your beautiful, young fiancée is waiting to get married and rush off to Cancun by your side, so what is your natural reaction? Well if you’re a man, it’s probably to get nervous and start calling up old girlfriends.
And so begins a single man’s odyssey through four hotel rooms as he flies across the United States in search of the perfect woman (that he’s already broken up with!)
By turns humorous and serious, this portrait of the artist as a young seducer casts a truthful, hilarious light on a typical American male as he wanders through the heart of darkness that is himself…
EDUCATING RITA by Willy Russell - December 2017 - March 2018
EDUCATING RITA follows the relationship between Rita, a young working-class hairdresser from Liverpool and Dr. Frank Bryant, a middle-aged University lecturer, during the course of a year.
Brash, straight-talking Rita bursts into University night classes determined to change her life. Her tutor Frank is a jaded lecturer, a failed poet and a self-acknowledged ‘appalling teacher of appalling students’ who has just about given up. In need of some extra cash, he agrees to tutor Rita, totally unaware of the whirlwind that’s about to enter his world….
Performed by Rosie Thorpe and Mike McAlpine, and directed by Ilya Parenteau.