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 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 *****

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 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.

Following her mother’s death, Alice Thompson stands to inherit half a million dollars. All she has to do to claim the money is to recall a few stories about her mother…100 stories in fact, and tell those stories to other people…within a week.

It all starts out well enough, but then the project takes on a life of its own. There’s an Instagram account and a whole lot of (unwelcome) public interest: there are requests for interviews, and then the police get involved.

And at the worst possible time, due to a speed dating accident, Alice falls in love.

Throughout it all, Alice knows there’s one last story that needs to be told – the one where she makes peace with her mother.