23:00, Tue 17th October 2006 at ADC Theatre

'Communities without fathers are vicious places to live and people who have money choose not to live there.' Charles Murray, The Sunday Times 2000.

'We sat and cuddled and cried. I sat rocking her like when she was a little baby. I sat rocking her for ages' Natalie, 'A State Affair'.

In 2000, Robin Soans and director Max Stafford-Clarke travelled to the Bradford Estate where groundbreaking playwright Andrea Dunbar had died tragically a decade before as a result of years of wife-beating.

'A State Affair' is the record of what they found...

Exploring abuse and misery driven by massively low expectations, 'A State Affair' is an example of the 'Verbatim' Theatre which Soans demonstrated to such effect in his recent play 'Talking to Terrorists'.

Its words are taken from real conversations, giving for one night only, honest and raw emotion, coupled with a rarely seen truth through theatre.

17:45, Thu 3rd – Mon 14th August 2006 at C Cubed Edinburgh Fringe
17:45, Wed 16th – Mon 28th August 2006 at C Cubed Edinburgh Fringe

'A letter which never reached Russia' is an Edinburgh show devised from the short stories of Vladimir Nabokov. Following in the footsteps of 'The Calvino Project', this production uses puppetry, physical theatre, slapstick, mime, mask-work, circus skills and scripting. Four of Nabokov's stories will be used to craft an exciting collaborative narrative, ranging from dragons, fables, bittersweet tales of love and loss, from horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. With an original score and design scheme.

www.first-theatre.com

20:00, Thu 22nd – Fri 23rd June 2006 at Christ's College Fellows Garden

19:30, Sat 17th June 2006 at Cambridge Corn Exchange

Too Darn Hot - a stunning concert of 'Songs from the Shows' brought to you by the UK's premier student musical theatre company.

Featuring a full orchestra, and some of the country's hottest young performers, the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society take you on a tour of the finest musicals, whisking you around the globe from the West End to Broadway and featuring songs from the world's best loved composers: Rogers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Stephen Sondheim.

The first concert of its kind and a truly special event, Too Darn Hot is a perfect summer night out for all the family!

23:00, Tue 7th February 2006 at ADC Theatre

Four women present four pieces of drama, 'A Woman Alone', 'The Same Old Story', 'The Rape', 'The Whore in the Madhouse': comic, grotesque and tragic, all triumphantly attesting to the power of female sexuality, and individuality.

This exploration of Abuse, Desire, Harassment, and Oppression will take the audience to extremes of laughter, fear, pain, hope and despair.

A housewife who 'has everything any woman could want' evaluates her roles as wife, mother, mistress, object of desire, slave. And woman. A woman falls pregnant to her left-wing, intellectual lover, whom she cannot persuade to be considerate of her. A young woman is abducted, tortured and raped by three men in a van, and is dumped in a park. A prostitute relates her story to a psychiatrist interviewing her in a mental institution.

19:00, Tue 7th – Sat 11th February 2006 at Corpus Playroom

The Fletcher Players present...

'A Taste of Honey' by Shelagh Delaney, Week 3 in the Corpus Playroom

'A Taste of Honey' created a stir in 1950s British theatre and society with its frank discussion of teenage pregnancy, racial prejudice and homosexuality. Set in a bedsit in Northern England, 17 year old Jo is forced into premature adulthood by her alcoholic mother and an unwanted pregnancy. In a poignant exploration of 'the outsider', we follow Jo's search for intimacy as she turns to other, socially ostracised, individuals, who helpher to reconstruct her shattered life.

I am looking for actors who are interested in working on a challenging production, which I am updating for the modern generation. The play requires sensitive actors who are eager to explore the individual's struggles against the social prejudices of our time.

23:00, Wed 18th – Sat 21st January 2006 at ADC Theatre

Set within the harsh glow of New York City in the oppressive comnfinement of 2 studio appartments. 'Marry Me a Little' explores the themes of loneliness, uncertainty, playfulness, romance,comfort and loss. People searching for someone to grab onto to help ease the bustling glare of life rushing by.

15:30, Sat 3rd – Sun 4th December 2005 at Fitzwilliam Museum Founder's Library
19:30, Wed 7th – Sat 10th December 2005 at Corpus Playroom
15:30, Sat 10th – Sun 11th December 2005 at Fitzwilliam Museum Founder's Library

101 years after their first publication, the ghost stories of M R James can still send a shiver down the spine. Now Nunkie Theatre Company are bringing two of the eeriest and most entertaining back to life - hard by the very places where they were originally conceived and performed.

In 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-book', a Cambridge antiquary discovers the dark sie of the manuscript illumination, in a medieval town in the French Pyrenees....

In 'The Mezzotint' a ghoulish revenge is enacted within a work of art, before the helpless eyes of a museum curator....

'A Pleasing Terror' will be performed in two venues closely associated with the author. The beautiful and atmospheric Founder's Library of the Fitzwilliam would have been James' office when he was Director of the Musuem. The public will have a rare chance to judge for themselves how fr the dark corners and book-lined walls of this marvellous interior may have influenced his supernatural fiction.

The Corpus Playroom is within sight of King's College, where James spent much of his life and where he first performed the stories to friends at Christmas - friends who doubtless smiled, but who also perhaps shifted a little uneasily in their seats as the strange don pursued his singular hobby of 'inspiring a pleasing terror....'

23:00, Tue 22nd November 2005 at ADC Theatre

Somewhere in America, manacled to a bed, is a man with a unique talent… the ability to dream winners.

Cody can foretell the outcome of horse races, and has been held captive by gangsters for years. But when he loses his magical talent, his fate is called into question – what use do his captors have for him now?

19:45, Tue 11th – Sat 15th October 2005 at ADC Theatre

"The night air is thick as molasses. Maggie doesn't notice the strap of her slip as it slides down one shoulder. The ice clinks softly in Brick's glass as he pours himself yet another drink. She's sick of the routine; he's sick of her. And tonight they've both reached boiling point. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a southern family's simmering secrets rise to the surface as the family gathers to bid a final happy birthday to their ailing Big Daddy.

Tennessee William’s Pulitzer Prize winning play about the lies and distance that are part of our nature comes to the ADC in its 50th anniversary year."