by Edward Percy and Reginald Denham - Directed by John Curtis - click to enlarge
Based on a famous murder which actually took place at the end of the last century and set in the 1880s, this play has become one of the most successful and most frequently performed in the modern repertoire. An eerie atmosphere of mystery is evoked in a dark, lonely house on the marshes of the Thames estuary. The characters, presented with great psychological realism and the strong vein of earthy comedy invest the play with a liveliness unusual for such a genuinely horrifying murder play.
by Michael Green - Directed by Bill Newman - click to enlarge
This one act play was successful at both the Barns Green Festival on 14th March, and the Arun Festival at Bognor on 11th April where it was awarded Best Play. It went on to be performed at Croydon in the C Division finals of the All England Theatre Festival as well as at a society Members’ Evening. There follows the Newsletter review from Peter Moore:
“Alone I burnt the throne. Upon a windswept Sussex hillside. The tears were stemmed by the remembrance of the finger catching, shin cracking swine of a thing. But it was a good prop and a good production, and we all enjoyed the old chap from start to finish. Speaking of the finish, the Society evening saw it as well performed as it ever had been. This in spite of a very real danger of delinquency, but that never happened. If it was to disintegrate, this was the time and place, but my guess is that nobody knew where to begin and who was to begin it. So it passed gracefully into history.”
This play (as well as the musical Cabaret) was adapted from the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood. It looks at life in a Berlin rooming house of 1930 with a photographic eye. Chris is a struggling young writer whose novel, I am a Camera, concerns the events occurring around him in the Berlin of 1930. Sally Bowles, a singer/actress, who works in a nightclub, befriends Chris and, despite her transient, bohemian existence, her platonic relationship with him remains steady.
by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows with Music & Lyrics by Frank Loesser - click to enlarge
Set in Depression-era Times Square, Guys and Dolls is about a couple of big city gamblers and the women who love them. It tells the overlapping stories of high-roller Sky Masterson, who falls in love with mission worker Sarah Brown, and lovable rapscallion Nathan Detroit, engaged for 14 years to Miss Adelaide, a headliner at the Hot Box Club. Nathan runs a famous floating crap game, and an ongoing plot line involves his quest for a safe place for the game as Adelaide continues her quest to convince him to marry her. Meanwhile, Sarah, mistakenly believing that Sky set up an illegal game at the mission, tries to fight her affection for the charismatic crapshooter.