2019 SEASON

No Exit (Huis Clos)
The Real Inspector Hound
​The Importance of Being Earnest
​A Midsummer Night's Dream
​Can't Pay?  Won't Pay!
The Lady from the Sea

No Exit (Huis clos)

By John Paul Sartre
​Unitarian Meeting House, Churchgate, Bury St Edmunds
7, 8, 9 March 2019
Director - Gwen Owen
​
​​No Exit (French: Huis Clos), was written in 1944 by the famous existentialist philosopher. The original title is the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors.  The play is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked together for all eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous quotation "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people".  A powerful and thought-provoking piece of theatre.

tHE REAL INSPECTOR HOUND

By Tom Stoppard
​Unitarian Meeting House, Churchgate, Bury St Edmunds
25, 26 & 27 April 2019
Director - Adam Thurkettle

Farcical and satirical drama parodying the Agatha Christie ‘parlour mystery’ while examining themes of fate, free will and the ‘play within a play’.  The mystery is set in Muldoon Manor, a lavish country pile surrounded by ‘desolate marshes’ and ‘treacherous swamps’…  Also located near a cliff.  Need we say more? 

the importance of being earnest

Click on Handbag image for tickets...

By Oscar Wilde
​Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds
5 - 8 June 2019
Director - Chris Lines
​
‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’
 
Wilde’s famous comedy of wit and manners is the story of a lost child and of men with fake friends they use as excuses to get out of dull engagements.  Add two young ladies looking for love, and a mother, the formidable Lady Bracknell, who wants only the best for her daughter.  Also a governess with a secret and you have the most timeless of comedies.  Oh, and there’s that handbag…
Will Cecily and Gwendolen obtain the men of their dreams or will a mother, a name, or a governess’s revelations put paid to their hopes of happiness?
 
‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’.

A midsummer night's dream

By William Shakespeare
​Abbey Gardens, Bury St Edmunds
9 - 13 July 2019
Director - Tim Lodge

​Shakespeare’s greatest comedy of mortals, fairies and ‘rude mechanicals’.  A hugely entertaining drama performed, of course, in the ‘original’ late C16th style with Elizabethan music and dance.  Best enjoyed with family, friends and a glass of something in the sunshine…
 
Our 8th outdoor Shakespeare production, now a regular and much loved feature of the West Suffolk activities calendar.  Bring a picnic and enjoy classic Shakespeare in beautiful surroundings.

'Lord, what fools these morals be!'

cAN'T pAY?  won't pAY!

By Dario Fo
​Unitarian Meeting House, Churchgate, Bury St Edmunds
26, 27 & 28 September 2019
Director - Chris Lines

THE LADY FROM THE SEA

By Henrik Ibsen
​Unitarian Meeting House, Churchgate, Bury St Edmunds
7, 8, 9 November 2019
Director - Tim Lodge

Mercurial, distracted and restless, Ellida feels desperately  trapped in her marriage.  She yearns for the sea and a broader horizon, for the furthest reaches of freedom, for an experience that is both liberating and dangerously self-destructive.  When a former lover returns from years of absence she is forced to decide between freedom and a new life she could make for herself.