KEVII HallPlay

When Richard Willey, a Government Junior Minister plans to spend the evening with Jane Worthington, one of the Opposition's typists, things go disastrously wrong, beginning with the discovery of a "body" trapped in the hotel's only unreliable sash window.

Desperately trying to get out of an extremely sticky situation, Richard calls for his PPS, George Pigden, who, through Richard's lies, sinks further and further into trouble with everybody and ends up going through an identity crisis.

Things go from bad to worse with the arrival of Ronnie, Jane's distraught young husband. With the addition of an unscrupulous waiter, Mrs Wiley and Nurse Foster, things really come to a head!

Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular is an irresistible, dark comedy that examines the interactions between three eccentric couples over three Christmas Eves as they rise and fall along the social ladder. A play in three acts, each act takes place in the kitchen of one of the couples, who try to survive both Christmas and each other, often to very unexpected results. As the women attempt to exert their dominance over the rest in their domestic domains, the men try to outdo each other in social standing. A mad dog, a suicidal wife, an electrocution and some inappropriate party games all add to this indeed absurd concoction, the outcome to which is a hilarious but captivating story filled with warmth, wit, and unending humor. It is an undeniably funny play about love and politics, but an equally biting commentary on class mobility.

In Absurd Person we see the emergence of a culture of self-interest in which the entrepreneurial small-businessman enjoys vindictive triumph over the arrogant professional classes. In today’s world when the world's most powerful corporations are cornered into requesting public-funding, and enterprising 22-year olds become overnight multi-millionaires over the internet, the issues of social upheaval and division that Absurd Person explores seem as, if not more, pertinent as when it was first written in the 1970s.

It is the height of the Edwardian period in England. One stormy night, at the entrance of St. Paul’s Church, London, a chance encounter takes place between two individuals who could not be more different – Eliza Doolittle, a poor Cockney girl struggling to peddle her wares, and Henry Higgins, a professor well-versed in phonetics. When Higgins makes a wager that with proper education, he could “pass [Eliza] off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party”, he starts off an extraordinary chain of events which culminates in a stunning climax where Eliza’s new-found skills are put to the acid test.

Adapted from C.S. Lewis' powerful re-telling of the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, 'Till We Have Faces' begins with the complaint of an old woman against the Gods. The woman, Orual, is bitter at the injustice of the gods, whom she accuses of having stolen her sister, the beautiful Psyche.

The play then takes a retrospective glance back at the events which lead to this complaint: from her turbulent childhood with an abusive father, her teenage years spent with her sisters, and the troubled situation in her kingdom, Glome, which culminated in Psyche's sacrifice. When Orual later discovers that Psyche is still alive, she tries to bring her back but is rebuffed-- Psyche says that she is now married to a god. Furious and disbelieving, Orual convinces herself that Psyche must be insane, and sets out on a desperate and ineffectual course of action that leads back to her complaint. Will the gods answer? Will Orual ever see Psyche again? Why should the gods meet us face to face...Till We Have Faces?