- February 2024
- November 2023
A young Nigel describes childhood in Wolverhampton, existing between his father's untreated rage and his mother's crap cooking - wrecked meals are often replaced (lovingly) with wedges of black, burnt toast. From Pyrex plates, to Bisto, to Terry's All Gold and Caramac, Nigel takes on culinary preparation (and a ‘girlish’ home economics class) in the face of teenage calamity: preferring ‘gay’ sweets, his mother’s death, his father's remarriage to the insidious Joan Potter, and the sourness that ensues between them as they fight knife and fork for Mr Slater's affections. A striking young chef at Nigel’s pub job sparks confidence in his queer exploration - when all comes to a head after his father’s passing, Nigel abandons the nightmarish Clayford home, as we leave him on the brink of a very different life at the steps of the Savoy.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/03/nigel-slater-meringue-recipes
- February 2023
Colin must be comforted in his grief over the death of his fiancee so his friends, who never met the girl, arrange a tea party for him.
- November 2022
Bored and bitter married couple George and Martha invite fresh faced Nick and Honey to an after-faculty-party-drinks. Exacerbated by the alcohol and resentment the night quickly unravels to expose both couples’ dysfunctions, George and Martha verbally spar with each other seemingly reaching no palpable limit and in doing so manage to unravel their carefully built irreality.
- June 2022
Peterhouse's 2022 May Week production is Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House'. Loving wife Nora Helmer's world is turned upside-down when she is blackmailed by an unexpected visitor. However, through this, she begins to see her marriage for what it really is. The subject of widespread controversy during its opening run, Ibsen's drama is now considered a classic of realist theatre.
- June 2021
- November 2019
Arthur Miller's 'A View from the Bridge' is timeless. Following the lives of Italian immigrants within 1950s Brooklyn, Miller raises the question of whether immigrants can ever feel truly at home in a country, or whether instead they will always be subject to feeling like an outsider. It is a play which feels particularly relevant given current discourse across the world about immigration.
Eddie Carbone is a working-class man longshoreman who lives with his wife Beatrice and niece Catherine, a young girl on the verge of womanhood and increasingly becoming the object of Eddie's affections. The family dynamic is disturbed the arrival of Beatrice's cousins Marco and Rodolpho, illegal immigrants from Sicily who are attempting to find work in the States. As Catherine and Rodolpho begin to have feelings for each other, Eddie grows more and more jealous and, narrated by lawyer Alfieri, the play reaches a dramatic climax.
- February 2018
★ HUMOUR US ★ is is a brand new comedy night for comedians (experienced or otherwise) who identify as female, non-binary and trans. Stand-up, sketches, songs -- anything funny, we want to see it! We want to showcase the talents of anyone discouraged from participating in comedy through a lack of representation, and promote integration between Cambridge University and ARU.
NB. Earlier in the day we will be running a free ★ COMEDY WORKSHOP ★ at Trinity Hall Lecture Theatre with our ★ HEADLINER AND SPECIAL GUEST ★ Lulu Popplewell.
★ PARTICIPATION IN THIS EVENT IS 100% OPEN TO (AND ENCOURAGED FOR) STUDENTS AT ARU ★
- February 2017
“I’m in a wood. Before this I was in a city. In that city there were numbers. I cut them into whole numbers. I made chains of them, always the same, like paper dolls.”
Ivan lives in a state defined by whole integers, a state above which the noose of the ‘Hangman’ of village lore hangs, a state however that has realised the efficacy of his groundbreaking scientific work and is hunting him down in order to cut off the potential of his discoveries. Will Ivan be able to escape the clutches of the state, and even if he does, will the darker side of his discovery and the history of his society catch up with him?
Come join us for this exciting new piece of student-penned drama and delve into a world so defined by mechanical processes you'd be hard set to find an apple, let alone an orchard…
- February 2017
“I’m in a wood. Before this I was in a city. In that city there were numbers. I cut them into whole numbers. I made chains of them, always the same, like paper dolls.”
Ivan lives in a state defined by whole integers, a state above which the noose of the ‘Hangman’ of village lore hangs, a state however that has realised the efficacy of his groundbreaking scientific work and is hunting him down in order to cut off the potential of his discoveries. Will Ivan be able to escape the clutches of the state, and even if he does, will the darker side of his discovery and the history of his society catch up with him?
- November 2016
"Oh I have seen enough to torture me"
Peterhouse Fresher's Play Michaelmas 2016
- June 2016
When Orfeo’s beloved wife Euridice dies, he dares to go down to Hades in an attempt to win her back. In doing so, he must use his unique gift of music to confront the forces of the Underworld. This gem of Renaissance opera poses many questions about the power of music, the position of the poet in the world, and his relationship to gods and mortals.
This production of what is considered by many to be the first true opera will be performed in Italian in the wonderful Peterhouse theatre. We will seek to explore both the Classical roots and the Renaissance conception of the work in the context of our later, post-Romantic perception of the nature of art.
- November 2015
Experience the shiny new Peterhouse dramatic talent in the Heywood Society Freshers' Play, Alan Ayckbourn's 'Table Manners'.
This hilarious portrait of mid-life crisis explores ordinary family tensions in the context of a rather extraordinary love triangle... Or hexagon.
The show comprises a motley crew of frustratingly sympathetic characters sat around the kitchen table of a country retreat as claustrophobic and crumbling as their relationships. Each lacks tact in a way you probably didn't know was possible and will leave you begging them to say more at some times and, at others, much less.
- February 2015
What's this? The Peterhouse theatre society is holding a last-minute smoker, so secret and exclusive that even they didn't know about it until recently?
Come and see your favourite comedians in an intense and frantic atmosphere which will only heighten the comedy - if also the tension - of the evening.
LINE-UP
TBC
TBC
TBC
TBC
- November 2014
The Peterhouse Freshers Play 2014
It's suburban London, the seventies, and Beverly has invited new neighbours Tony and Angela over.
Thrown into the mix is Beverly's long-suffering, olive-loving husband Laurence, and divorced neighbour Sue, whose daughter Abigail is having a party next door. As alcohol flows and conversation stagnates, the excruciating, Freshers' Week-level awkwardness reaches a devastating climax...
For three nights, Peterhouse's historic theatre will be hosting this most unusual party, and you're invited.
You will laugh, you will cringe, and you will cringe some more as Mike Leigh's classic comedy comes to Cambridge's classiest college.
"And you were enjoying yourself?"
"Yeah. We were all enjoying ourselves, weren't we?”
No character in 'Abigail's Party' could honestly answer "Yes" to that question, but you can.
- March 2014
Dr. Diane Cassell is a leading academic in Earth Sciences, at a university where climate science is the new ‘hip’ degree on offer. She is also a denier of anthropogenic global warming, better known as climate change. For her lack of belief in the most attractive religion of the 21st century, she is vilified and threatened by those around her, and as the controversy becomes increasingly political, and personal, she must decide whether clinging to her own convictions is worth what they will cost her.
Juggling her job, an anorexic daughter, a baffling new student and multiple death threats, it will not be easy.
- November 2013
An evening of hilarity and bewilderment from Peterhouse's freshers. Three couples celebrate their anniversary by dining out. Two of them are gangsters, none of them are as sane as they pretend to be, and the restaurant's staff are unable to resist questioning the meaning of life, the universe, and everything - what could possibly go wrong?
- March 2013
A night of stand-up comedy in Cambridge's oldest college.
- February 2013
An evening of stand-up and sketches in Peterhouse.
- November 2012
"I put it to you! - Are you the real Inspector Hound!?"
Muldoon Manor, one morning in early spring. A dangerous madman is wandering the marshes, a mysterious but dashing stranger has arrived out of nowhere, and the fog is starting to roll in...
Moon and Birdboot, two theatre critics, are watching this country house mystery, hoping for their break on the reviewing scene. It's not long, however, before they become rather more involved in the play - and it's actors - than they may have counted on.
Both a farcical parody of the drawing room murder mystery genre, and a satire on the theatre critique industry, 'The Real Inspector Hound' is an absurdist comedy with a dark twist even the characters don't see coming.
- November 2012
The inaugural smoker held in the illustrious Friends of Peterhouse Theatre.
- February–March 2009
