What's On

Synopsis

A quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal.

Alice is so authentically herself. Larry is incapable of vulnerability. Dan uses other people’s flaws to distract from his own. Anna is set on contorting herself into everyone else’s idea of who she should be.

Closer is a play which views love and sex like politics: its not what you say that matters, still less what you mean, but what you do. A brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance.

Synopsis

Dancing At Lughnasa tells the story of five colourful sisters, barely surviving on a hardscrabble farm in 1930’s Ireland, and the powerful moment that changes their lives forever. This is director Sean McKenna’s version of the International stage success by Irish playwright Brian Friel.
A young boy tells the story of growing up in a fatherless home with his unmarried mother and four spinster aunts in 1930s Ireland. Five women different in temperament and capability from one another form a firm emotional support system for one another (reluctantly at times), with the eldest assuming the role of “somewhat meddling” overseer. Into this comes their elderly brother, a priest too senile to perform his clerical functions who has “come home to die” after a lifetime in Africa. Then the boy’s father rides up on a motorcycle–to announce that he’s on his way to Spain to fight against Franco. Although undeniably affected by the presence of the two men, the sisters continue to cope as a close-knit unit until something happens that disrupts the fabric of that cohesiveness beyond repair.

Synopsis

Britain, 1981. Two women have reached the top of their respective fields. Tory, Margaret Thatcher has been elected the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister and Marlene has been promoted to Managing Director of Top Girls Employment Agency. To celebrate, Marlene throws a dinner party for herself and other ‘Top Girls’ from history, art and myth. But what of the girls left behind? The girls who clean the houses, work behind the till, care for the kids?

An early masterpiece by Caryl Churchill, one of Western Theatre’s greatest living playwrights Top Girls is an epic, prescient exploration into the rise of neoliberalism, corporate feminism and the eternal question; what does success really look like?

Synopsis

Patricia Highsmith, the author of the “Mr Ripley” novels, now living as a recluse in the remote Swiss Alps, is visited by Edward Ridgeway, from her New York publishing company. Ridgeway attempts to coax her into writing a final edition of the famed novels. A high-stakes power struggle ensues, combined with an exploration of the author’s relationship with her famous creation, in which fiction begins to teeter dangerously on the cliff of reality.