- February 2015
Alan fast-forwards every tape to its end. Carol fantasizes about what's going on upstairs. The radio goes dead. Gunshots echo downstairs. 'Wait, play that back to me again?'
A surreal comedy two-hander set in a dystopian future.
- January 2015
Night falls on Milton Keynes, and most of the city falls asleep. But there’s one coffee shop that’s just opened. Within its doors, a mysterious waitress serves up drinks, and visitors serve up stories. 'Midnight Café' is a weird, dreamy window into the hopes and fears of a new millennium.
- January 2015
Kate Cooper is a journalist. When she turns up at Rev. Richard Rose's house to do a profile on him for the local paper, she ends up getting a little more than she bargained for. What starts off as a standard interview quickly becomes an intense discussion of faith, with the two characters opening up to each other in a frank, and often uncomfortable, way.
- December 2014
“We don’t want people to know our name, that’s the key to success if you’re an arms dealer”
Welcome to the weapons industry, the world’s second oldest profession, in which the profits are measured in billions and the loses are measured in lives. After a devastating terrorist attack at the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, the German weapons manufacture Heckler and Koch are pulled into the controversy under suspicion of industrially sponsored terrorism. Listen to how the executives tread water to survive. Paronia, leaking, hacking and meat. They will be enmeshed, entangled and strangled into the greatest scandal of the twenty first century, rapidly flying into uncharted Territory.
- November 2014
Time-travelling quantum physicist Chadwick travels the universe with his four child companions, fighting the forces of evil – until one of them gets time-cancer, and has to be left to die in 1880's London. Six years after bringing the others back home, Chadwick finally returns to present day Earth. But when the ghosts of the past start to emerge, the world is threatened by something more terrible than even he could ever have imagined.
- November 2014
Five centuries ago, in the foothills of northern Albania, the Angel Prince wrote the Kanun, a book of law. Today it is still the only law. When Liridon’s father is killed, the family’s honour is lost and the Kanun states he must enter a blood feud to regain it. Liridon must kill or remain shamed.
- November 2014
Simon Gully, another enfant terrible of the contemporary art world, sits in a hotel room with a gun in his hand, recording his final tape. His latest artwork, Union Jack, has fired up a media storm after it was mentioned in the suicide note of a Pakistani teenage girl. His supporters say the work is deeply satirical; his detractors claim it is sincere extremist propaganda. Simon sifts through the conversations, documents and memories on the path of his downfall. But has Simon got a secret agenda? Has he got any agenda at all? Who, if anyone, is misinterpreting the work?
- November 2014
In three short months, Oscar Wilde, the most celebrated playwright and wit in Victorian England, was toppled from the apex of British society into humiliation and ruin. Openly drawing from trial documents, newspaper accounts and writings from the key players, 'A Waste of Shame' reconstructs Wilde's three trials and the events surrounding them, whilst also examining how the legend of Oscar Wilde emerged in the years following his imprisonment and death.
- November 2014
‘What’s the hurry, Woyzeck? You rush through the world like an open razor. You’ll give someone a nasty cut.’
‘When the sun’s at noon and its like the whole world was going up in flames. That’s when a terrible voice spoke to me.’
‘The moon’s rising. Look how red it is. Like blood on iron.’
An adaptation of Georg Büchner's influential, incomplete stage play. Woyzeck is the story of a lowly soldier stationed in a provincial German town, the father of an illegitimate child by his mistress Marie. Woyzeck holds life together for his family by performing menial jobs for the Captain and taking part in medical experiments conducted by the Doctor. His mental health breaks down when he discovers Marie’s infidelity. A series of apocalyptic visions and psychotic delusions lead to murder. Based on a true story of an ex-soldier who killed his mistress in a psychotic crime of passion, the play was both the first work to root tragedy in the working classes, and the first clinically observed case of psychosis in literature.
This new working of Büchner's classic material sets the drama in 1960s London, telling the story of the doomed relationship between playwright Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. As Orton’s artistic star begins to outshine that of his lover and mentor, Halliwell becomes increasingly mentally unstable. The play takes the universal themes of Woyzeck – love, jealousy, exploitation, betrayal, murder – and explores them in terms of twentieth-century depression and disenfranchisement.
- October 2014
Imagine being born again. In real life, such a second chance is called organ transplantation. So, what do you do with a second life?
In five distinct scenes, I See You gives an insight into the lives of four organ transplant recipients and their comatose organ donor. While balancing the drama and darkness with the absurd and comedic, the play explores the human fault of relying on external events when pursuing a life worth living.
The episode will be available to listen back to for 40 days after broadcast here: http://www.camfm.co.uk/shows/cambridge-shortlegs-presents/
- October 2014
"Is that a rolex?"
"It is"
"I bet you don't recycle"
"Are you high?"
"I am super hung-over"
A tired management consultant and a hungover theology student, flung together by the winds of Easyjet seat bookings, attempt to solve the world… airline food is eaten, angry birds is played, not a whole lot is solved. On a plane.
A comic short exploring life inside the bubble and quite how useless most "successful" people are.
- October 2014
“We were down South, in Alabama--Bill Driscoll and myself-when this kidnapping idea struck us…”
Originally a short story by turn of the century author O. Henry, Ransom of The Red Chief is a Wild West misadventure narrated by its protagonist, the wry and cynical conman Sam.
In Sam’s linguistically acrobatic narrative, he and his partner Bill attempt to make a quick buck by kidnapping the son of a small-town banker. Naturally, everything goes horribly wrong.
Witty, irreverent and beautifully evocative of the period and place, Ransom of The Red Chief makes a slick transition from dark kidnap narrative to ridiculous farce as its protagonists’ competence as criminals is steadily undermined.
