Comic Potential
by Alan Ayckbourn
March - April 2016, October 2013
Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames
and New Wimbledon Studio, Wimbledon
"If it makes you laugh - treasure it."
A captivating comedy set in the foreseeable future, about what makes us human - why we laugh, and why we fall in love.
Android actress ‘Jacie’ is just one of many machines built to play roles in daytime soap operas. However, when she begins to develop her own sense of humour, the staff are baffled, and energetic young writer Adam is intrigued. As they run away together, poor Jacie's scrambled circuits try to make sense of the completely illogical process that love is.
Doubt: A Parable
by John Patrick Shanley
October 2015
Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames
"There is no such thing as a simple truth."
St. Nicholas Catholic School, New York, 1964. A year after President Kennedy’s assassination, uncertainty fills the air, but, according to progressive priest Father Flynn, “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.”
Meanwhile, austere school principal Sister Aloysius has her own doubts about Father Flynn’s moral conduct. As she wages war and vows to bring him down, he strongly protests his innocence. Without proof, the only thing certain is doubt.
Pygmalion
by George Bernard Shaw
October 2014
Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames
"Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba."
Professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, takes on his most difficult task when he bets that he can train a common flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to speak like a lady and pass for a duchess at an embassy ball. While at first success seems "not bloody likely", it soon becomes clear that Eliza's transformation has been a triumph of the professor's art. But will she thank him for it?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
June 2012
Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre, Walton-on-Thames
"Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?"
Set ‘in the wings’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead focuses on the escapades and fate of two nobodies with a penchant for coin-flipping.
While they haplessly seek to understand the perplexing world in which they find themselves, the ill-fated duo pass the time with mind games, witty chat and philosophy...