programme for
september 2001 to march 2002

Please note:

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

Sat 22nd - Sat 29th Sep 2001

A sexy political fairytale. Winner of the 2001Tab Lab playwrights slam. Mel's father disappears on a business trip to Moscow. "Is he dead or alive: a hero or a gangster or just some greedy little man who messed up? I need to know!" Mel steals her mother's credit card and flies to Russia to find out. She is fifteen, alone and in danger. But in Moscow anything can happen and the statue of the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky awakes to guide her through passions past and present.

More about this production

"You'd have to be a statue not to be moved." Scotland on Sunday

Tue 2nd - Wed 3rd Oct 2001

A seedy and corrupt Mayor and his councillors have let their small town go to rack and ruin while they enjoy living off the fat of the land. But one day, to their horror, they hear that the government inspector will be arriving incognito to check up on them...

Gogol's classic fable is given hilarious new life by the critically acclaimed Barebones Theatre Company.

Sat 20th - Sat 27th Oct 2001

So you are a huge success? So you are topping the bill at the Palladium? So there's more to life isn't there? Silence and Limelight, the latest musical comedy by Toby Collins, the award winning writer of Risk and producer / director of Assassins, is a comedy set in the backstage world of the cabaret circuit. It charts the rise to fame of a cabaret duo. One who craves the limelight while the other is desperate to find silence. With a large cast and 17 musical numbers, dance routines and the transformation of the New Venture Theatre into the Palladium, it promises to be the musical highlight of NVT's season.

See also Accidental Scandals on Saturday, 13th October!

Wed 7th - Sat 10th Nov 2001

Sat 24th Nov - Sat 1st Dec 2001

The Accrington Pals is set in the First World War. It tells the story of a group of young men from Accrington, Lancashire who joined up to fight and, more particularly, of the women they left behind. The focus of this powerful and moving play switches back and forth between the battlefields of France and the cobbled backyards of North-west England as both the men who marched away to war and the women who stayed at home find the courage, humour and resilience to live ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances.

Tue 4th - Sat 8th Dec 2001

Following their sell-out production in June 2001 of My Mother Said I Never Should, Sweetpot Theatre returns with Blavatsky's Tower, Moira Buffini's darkly comic and compelling piece centring around the weird dynamics of a highly dysfunctional family.

More about this production

Wed 19th - Sat 22nd Dec 2001

A Dark Fantasy. One chill evening in a gloomy monastery, a gaggle of media babes congregates before an all-important shoot. But the place has more to offer than a low-cost roof over their ambitious and cynical heads. Exploiting to the full the period atmospherics of our upstairs theatre, Descent is the perfect Christmas chiller. Do not come alone!

More about this production

Sat 26th Jan - Sat 2nd Feb 2002

Sat 23rd Feb - Sat 2nd Mar 2002

The Trojan War drags on. And on. The Greeks want to go home. The Trojans have just lost their King, are besieged, and plague has broken out. It's mad...

Hecuba and Ismene, high-born women from each side, hammer out a peace deal which would work and give everyone what they want ... except in a mad world, as they find out, it's the maddest solution which must prevail. People must be killed to save lives: war is the only way of ensuring peace: the new city must be raised on the ruins of the old: the slaughter of children will ensure the future. In The Woman Edward Bond confronts the defeatism of classical tradition and metamorphoses it into an inspiring alternative myth which celebrates justice, reason and compassion.

Read a review of this show

M a i n

H o u s e

S t u d i o

T h e a t r e

S o u t h

H a l l