11th to 13th July 2024
The CryerArts Centre, 39 High St, Carshalton SM5 3BB to be directed by David Hedges.
Two is a funny but poignant and heart warming play.
Meet the landlady and landlord of an ordinary pub as they try to keep a smile on their faces as they serve a variety of customers, constantly niggling at each other as they try to come to terms with something that happened earlier in their marriage. Meet too the pub regulars, all with their own stories to tell, and many of them with something to say that might help the landlord and landlady to deal with their issues. A tour de force for two actors, who play all of the customers as well as the landlord and landlady..
Two, which was first performed in 1989 at Bolton’s Octagon Theatre and later in London at The Young Vic Theatre, won the playwright, Jim Cartwright, the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Best New Play. He then went on to write the highly acclaimed play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice in 1992 which was winner of both the Evening Standard and the Olivier Award for Best Comedy of the Year.
The play is set in a typical northern pub run by a bickering husband and wife. Through the play we gradually learn about the pub owners and the dozen regulars who pass through their pub in an evening. All fourteen characters are played by just two actors, each vignette skilfully combining pathos and humour. When a little boy is left behind by his father, a fragile reconciliation occurs as their own dark tragedy is revealed.
“Sharp-talking comedy makes way for bleak urban poetry; a karaoke singalong one minute, a domestic abuse drama the next; there are plenty of laughs and big dollops of sentiment.” (The Guardian). This psychological drama, written by Jim Cartwright, is at once “Absolutely riveting.” (Daily Telegraph) and at the same time “Astonishing, funny and sad.” (Daily Express).
This production includes material of an adult nature.
Tickets will be only sale later this month.
20th to 23rd November 2024
at the Adrian Mann Theatre, Ewell, KT17 3DR to be directed by Dick Bower
The Night of the Iguana is a classic piece of theatre by acclaimed American playwright, Tennessee Williams, that exposes the “heart of the human condition”. Originally performed in 1961 on Broadway with a cast that included Bette Davis and Shelley Winters, it won Williams his fourth New York Drama Critics Award and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. It was turned into an Oscar-winning film in 1964, starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr.
The play has had several revivals in London including one that Richard Eyre directed at the National Theatre in 1992 and, most recently, another in 2019 at the West End’s Noel Coward Theatre starring Clive Owen. Now SADC will bring you this sultry but powerful psychological drama with its underlying themes of sexual desire, alienation and loneliness.
Set in a run-down Mexican hotel on the edge of the jungle, a very disparate group of people, all exquisitely rendered through Williams’s “lambent, fluid, malleable and colloquially melodious” writing, comes together in the heat of the tropics. The three main characters have something in common – they have reached a climacteric in their troubled lives. They grapple with the prospects for their futures but will the changes set them free from their pasts? The iguana of the title is a metaphor, a creature captured and tied up by the hotel staff, desperate for release. But, for our characters, is freedom what they want? Or is it too daunting?
An audition will be held in summer 2024 and an audition notice published shortly before.
March 2025
Venue to be advised.
To be directed by David Page.
June 2025
at The CryerArts Centre, 39 High St, Carshalton SM5 3BB
To be directed by Karen Boradbent.
November 2025
Venue to be advised.
To be directed by Sheila Carr.
March 2026
Venue to be advised.
To be directed by Peter Bramwell.