programme for
may 2007 to july 2007

Sat 5th - Sat 19th May 2007

A government is presenting blatently false information as the truth. Leaders pose as religious men drawn reluctantly into war. There is arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial. A group of "outsiders" is demonised as the cause of all this unrest. Great power is held not by the great but by great actors. Even innocent children are killed by men in their obsessive pursuit of power and wealth.

In Richard III, Shakespeare tells the story of what happens to a country when criminals are in charge; in so doing he wrote the definitive play of 2007.

Part of Brighton Festival Fringe 2007

Tue 22nd - Sun 27th May 2007

A junk shop. Three small-time crooks plot to carry out the midnight robbery of a coin collection. In the hours leading up to the heist, friendship becomes the victim in a conflict between loyalty and business.

The conflict explored by Mamet here is the clash between business and friendship -- between a man's ethics and his desire to succeed in a world where so much of the population has subscribed to a shared myth of capitalism. As one character tells his younger friend, "There's business and there's friendship" -- two worlds which will be combined and then torn apart by the time the play is finished.

Part of Brighton Festival Fringe 2007

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Sat 23rd - Sat 30th June 2007

A play about decadence, desire and dictatorship. Inside a beautiful state residence on the edge of an Eastern European city four women wait. They talk about such things as Toy Story 2, Prada handbags, Chilli Vodka, anything... for outside, as snow is falling, civil wars looms ever nearer. With wit and a characteristic delight in the strange, Abi Morgan's writing brilliantly encompasses both the cruel veneer of our lives and the beating heart within.

This is Abi Morgan's fourth play, originally commissioned by Paines Plough with Granada TV Writers Award. First performed at the Traverse Theatre August 2000.

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Sat 21st - Sat 28th July 2007

The prison governor's hope in giving his Botany Bay convicts a play to perform is to civilise them. But this play is so much more than a story about giving "nasty people nice things to say in order to make them nice". Set in 1789 against a backdrop of the extraordinary clash between European and Aboriginal cultures, the play is about the overwhelming transformation that can come with the acquisition of language -- the facility to communicate our thought, our feeling. That's its huge power and its potential to move, to amuse and to delight.

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Please note:

Please check performance times with the box office before booking your tickets.

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