- March 2026
What happens after we die? What's the afterlife like? And why would anyone perform sketch comedy there?
Four Sketches and a Funeral is a brand new comedy following down on their luck comedians in their last ever performance before their souls leave their body. No pressure, right? A show about laughing at life, death, and everything brilliant in-between, it won't be one to miss.
- March 2026
One sofa. One duffel bag. Eight thousand pounds. One Brazy Night follows the frantic aftermath of a botched robbery in an East London flat where the cost of a dream is higher than expected. Femi is a gifted artist suffocating in her environment, now paralysed by the guilt of the crime and her desperate hunger for a seat at an art school in Florence. She is protected by Grace, her fiercely loyal ride-or-die who is willing to risk her own freedom to ensure her best friend actually has a future. Between them is Dante, Grace’s "hustler" boyfriend; he is determined to help the girls see the plan through and protect them at all costs. As police sirens wail and the adrenaline of the night turns into the tragedy of the morning, the trio must face the heavy reality of sacrifice when you're just trying to get out.
- March 2026
Forgotten ‘60s singer Selena Cross is about to retire for good when rising pop icon Pussycat Venus stumbles into her front room one morning. Chaos, romance, comedy, and music ensue.
- March 2026
Put your suit on, hold your martini delicately and click your heels together: The Black Tie Smoker returns.
As ever, this competition will reward the best performer of the night with a trophy (French Apple Flan Pastry Dish).
Join us for a fantastic and classy night of standup and sketch all in the beautiful Pembroke Old Library.
Judged by the honourable Dr Becky Coombs.
- March 2026
Troy has faced destruction, but new sufferings await for the former queen, Hecuba. Her Greek captors demand blood, and the old lady appears powerless to prevent it. They do not expect her grief to become rage, to fuel a burning desire for vengeance.
- March 2026
Loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, set a few years after the First World War, Darling Dido is the coming-of-age story of Dido, who is a sixteen-year-old mixed-race girl living in 1920s England.
She is the result of an affair between her now retired naval officer father and a woman from the British West Indies. Raised in an upper middle class English family, disciplined, and educated into the image of white refinement, Dido is caught between a desire to conform to white upper-class civility or find her place within the shifting social tides of post-war Britain. But overall, she yearns most deeply for the one thing she believes will secure her place in the world: love, marriage, and motherhood. What becomes of a girl who mistakes love for salvation?
An Intimate, disturbing, and emotionally raw historical fiction, the play explores racial relations, love, and the dangerous longing to belong, challenging myths of romance and respectability.
- March 2026
Get ready for a totally humerus sketch show!
(no promises we won't re-use that pun in the show)
Dive into a sketch world dominated by doolally doctors, naughty nurses, and bonkers, bone-related bants. The hospital is so full of mischief and malpractice, it makes us wonder if the show should actually be called 'Operation Owieeeeeeee!'
This raucous medicinal comedy is full of larger-than-life characters and silly scenarios, so pop your paracetamols and get ready for this one-night wonder!
- February 2026
N.B. this show has been cancelled
Why do we keep living if not to keep each other company. Why do you think we’ve survived so long, huh?
Two immortals: Christophine, deliverer of souls to the afterlife, and Levi, a freelance necromancer who resuscitates souls for a fee. By nature of their work, they just keep running into each other. For how long, Christophine can’t remember. It seems she has always worked for Heaven – millennia have that effect on memory. But he remembers a lot more than she of their previous lives, of their former names, and a love they had shared now soured and forgotten by the ages.
- February 2026
"I’m doing the first step, you dumbass. I’m admitting I’ve got a problem."
Four siblings, four corners of the world, connected only by calls. Their lives are tangled with school, love, and secrets, but for now, they’re just talking. But a sudden family crisis throws everything out of their delicate balance.
Through laughter, arguments, and awkward check-ins, old tensions bubble to the surface and everyone’s masks start to slip. Love, grief, and responsibility collide in unexpected ways. Can they hold each other together from miles apart, or will distance win?
“I wasn’t perfect. None of us are.”
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ by TAB: “the play does a brilliant job of reflecting how integral a part siblings play in your life,” “go and watch this incredible piece of student-written theatre while you can”
https://thetab.com/2026/02/18/review-ringing
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ by Varsity: "Ringing is relatable and heart-wrenching"
https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/31252
- February 2026
Frankie Teardrop is forced to choose between giving birth to eggs or going to war. What will Frankie choose? We can only find out once the egg is cracked.
‘Red + White’ is Gaia’s debut one clown show where she decides whether it’s:
Eggs or War
Red or White
Tragedy or Comedy
- February 2026
"I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives."
Elyot and Amanda are happily married; just not to each other. Five years after their tempestuous divorce, they find themselves in adjoining hotel suites on their honeymoons with their new, significantly younger spouses, Sibyl and Victor. The setup is a recipe for disaster: Elyot and Amanda’s three-year marriage was as passionate as it was explosive, ending in tragedy. Now, their unsuspecting new partners, already uneasy about their spouses’ pasts, find themselves caught in the crossfire.
- February 2026
"I love this y’ know. I love it when we're all out together an’ havin’ a laugh. It's good isn't it? It's great."
On the night of their hen and stag parties, bride-to-be Linda and her fiancé Dave unwittingly end up celebrating in the same crowded nightclub. Neon lights, cheap lager, and thundering disco beats blur the two groups together. But the night shifts when Peter - Linda’s charming, impossible-to-forget ex - appears out of nowhere. Old feelings collide with new commitments, and tensions flare as the past fights for a place in the present.
- January 2026
The Pembroke Players are back in New Cellars with another term of fantastic variety nights from well seasoned comics to those sparkling with naivety.
Join us for the comedy comedy comedy night in Cambridge it's comedy. With complementary wine for all.
'Unacceptably terse and left wing' - The Telegraph
'Winner of the Booker Prize' - Booker Prize judging panel
'The host is fairly attractive' - The host's string of lovers
- December 2025
Hope needs feeding, fear feeds itself…
1943, a small village in rural Italy. War grows closer, hunger governs all. But mermen bring the real danger; mysterious creatures circling beneath the waves, waiting to feast.
Enter Salvestro, a travelling pianist, who enlists the help of Lucio, an injured veteran and village drunkyard, to put on a concert for the village. But his efforts place him on a collision course with the village’s ruthless mayor who endeavours to crush this dream by whatever means necessary…
- November 2025
N.B. this show has been cancelled
Minnie and Grace hate theatre. And they’re obsessed with it. It’s complicated. Exasperated with the underfunding of theatre in their state school, and the frankly embarrassing quality of the drama it does produce, the two friends decide to find a rehearsal space and put on their own show. As they rehearse, they flit between self belief and delusion, ego and friendship, and battle with the question of who gets to take up space and indulge in creative play in an environment with limited time and resources. The play is a comedy drama about two teenage girls deciding to unleash their ambitions on the world, as chaotically as they possibly can.
- November 2025
The women of Athens have a problem. It's big. It's huge. And, by god, it's really really hard.
Lysistrata is a classic ancient Greek comedy about a group of women, sick of their husbands neglecting them and making ridiculous decisions. Led by Lysistrata, they join forces across Greece to propose a daring solution to their collective problem: a sex strike. It might seem mad at first, but soon they are causing chaos across all of Greece. With a design vision which shifts the play to the early 2000s, the WAGs of Athens in this production have decided enough is enough. 💋💋💋
- November 2025
N.B. this show has been cancelled
A crash test.
- November 2025
- November 2025
“How pretty the sky is! I ought to go there on a rocket that never comes down.”
A visitor arrives at a small apartment in the French Quarter. A sister spirals. Nothing will ever be the same. On a street in New Orleans, in the sweet heat of summer, past and present collide. The fragile peace between two lives begins to unravel, and secrets push their way up to the surface. Step into the world of 'A Streetcar Named Desire', Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, and experience this timeless domestic drama where desire simmers beneath every word, dreams collapse, and reality and illusion collide.
- November 2025
Welcome back to Pigs: a comedy night like no other.
Expect the weird and wonderful in this bonkers one-night variety night. Come meet the Pigs.
- November 2025
N.B. this show has been cancelled
I am blindfolded and stand in the road. I am enshrouded in the sheets I will die in and I know they will kill me before I try to sleep. I know and I continue.
An absurdist, hallucinogenic drama exploring fetish, pornography and the illusion of consent. The play tackles the latent perversion of the 1970s sexual liberation movement in an age of surveillance, atomism and ‘the rolling back of the state’. Fragmented, alienating, nonlinear, impersonal and explicit, the play showcases how an overexposure to violent sex renders us oversaturated and bored by it.
- November 2025
The Pembroke Players are celebrating Halloween with a late perfectly normal comedy night. Nothing spooky or weird about this at all. At all.
That isn't AI it's a wasted life of analogue editing.
- October–November 2025
“As I often say to myself, in order to make a story, or indeed, a life, one must surely ask oneself, at least to start with… who am I?”
Finding the courage to be yourself. A play of radical acceptance, following the life of young Orlando as they navigate growing up, love, life and loss all the way from the court of Elizabeth I, right up until the 1920s. If a life lived for hundreds of years was not enough, Orlando goes from living life as a man, to living life as a woman.
Written for, and based on, Woolf’s lover, the enigmatic Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a lyrical love letter to queerness and self-discovery. A tender portrait of a person who lives as much as the world has to offer and more.
Bartlett’s bold adaptation celebrates the continuing importance of Orlando’s story, in a new and inclusive, whimsical and moving tale.
- October 2025
The Pembroke Players' alternative variety night like no other... come and see.
- June 2025
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
When Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy first meet, it's dislike at first sight. Born into a lesser noble family with four sisters, with nothing to recommend them but their charms, Elizabeth is beneath the wealthy Mr Darcy's notice. Elizabeth sees Mr Darcy as a man born only of unpleasant arrogance and privilege. Their pride and prejudice blinds them to each other's true feelings, but can they overcome their flaws in spite of all obstacles, and find their way to happiness together?
Experience Jane Austen's classic tale of hate to love, revitalised in this production full of laughter, colour, and life.
- May 2025
"And, you know what? There will come a day when you’ve holed yourself so deep into your letters that not even we’ll be able to find your way out for you!."
Adapted from the 2024 play by Sophia Orr
Everyone knows Jane Austen. Ever winning the race of Britain's favourite female writers, her wit and humour and wisdom in all matters of society and romance seem to know no bounds, as charisma flows from her every word.
And everyone knows a 'Jane'. Everyone has a favourite, yet-to-be-prolific, yet-to-write-anything author, constantly struggling with writer's block, mental blocks, and the eternal romantic cockblock of 'far too high standards'.
And everyone knows they would never want to be 'Jane'.
Faced with constant scrutiny in the polite society of 1800s Bath and the painful flashbacks to her romantic failings, Jane begins to barricade herself into her own mind, a barricade which can only be pierced by the written word.
Enter Emma. Emma Watson. The heroine of Jane's latest scrawlings and now also the heroine of Jane's own life.
With Emma as her increasingly constant friend, saviour, and comforter, Jane's real, past, and fictional worlds begin to blur, and the worry grows whether she will ever find her way back to the present.
- May 2025
When Gary was preparing for the end of his life, he thought it would be a private moment. But death, as well as life, very rarely goes to plan, and before he can jump from a very high height, he is joined by a complete stranger about to do the exact same thing. Can you help someone at their lowest point if you’re feeling just as hopeless? Can you persuade someone else that their life is worth living while you’re confident your own is not? These questions and more riddle these two unlikely friends, as they clamour to find a meaning of life in the most desperate of circumstances.
- May 2025
- March 2025
Ye asked and ye shall receive: the Pembroke Mock Lecture Series has returned.
We are also once again very happy to be fundraising for The Brain Tumour Charity as part of this event.
- March 2025
When Casey, an enigmatic, charismatic, self-proclaimed god comes to town, this precipitates a crisis for devoutly religious, socially conservative Joseph.
This modern adaptation of Euripides' Bacchae focuses on the tragedy of repression, the lure of being different, and the agony of feeling trapped.
- March 2025
"Dunhuang" is a musical set along the Silk Road, where A-Lai, a modern student, works to restore ancient Buddhist murals in the Dunhuang caves. After damaging a statue, she is transported back in time and meets Liansheng. Together, they uncover secrets tied to a missing lotus and explore mystical caves.
- March 2025
As many of you may know, Pembroke Players is the oldest collegiate theatre society in Cambridge. Come take a trip down theatre memory lane and get ready to receive - it's the 69th anniversary smoker.
- February 2025
The Black Tie Smoker returns. Hype.
- February–March 2025
"Quite the contrary. I never doubted for an instant that you would have me put to death."
Creon wakes up one morning to find himself King of Thebes. He said "yes" because somebody had to captain the ship, and now he will never stop paying. Antigone, on the other hand, wants everything of life, and she wants it now. She is of the tribe that asks the questions, and she is here to say "no". The play is on. Antigone has been caught. She has made up her mind. And now, it seems, nothing less than a cosy tea party with death and destiny will quench her thirst.
Antigone is a modern adaptation of Sophocles' tragedy which interrogates authority and integrity. Despite the howling mob - the torture - the fear of death - our little Antigone is wriggling her way out of the straitjacket of human vestment. And what are we possibly to do for her? Condemn her to live?
- February–March 2025
Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Questions
"Writer: ...Tell me- how can you write a play about someone who sees life realistically and dreams about it romantically?
Manasi: I can't think of a better protagonist for a play.
Writer: No. It's not possible. The more I tie him up in a plot, the more he escapes; says it isn't real. The more lines I write for him, the more he stands outside them. Says they are not real. Oh! He know's too much- altogether too much!"
What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Evam Indrajit, by Badal Sircar, dives into this universal question with humour, heartbreak, and a touch of surrealism. At its core, a writer struggles with writer’s block, for he knows not the struggles of the poor or the luxuries and love interests of the rich. He is only surrounded by normal, boring people, unworthy of ever being a story. That is when he turns to four people in the audience—Amal, Vimal, Kamal, and Indrajit—for inspiration, he finds that their lives are strikingly normal, following predictable paths of work, family, and routine. But within this ordinariness lies an extraordinary tension: Indrajit’s profound, almost painful awareness of life’s emptiness and his resistance to simply conforming.
Do you want to question your role in the scripts of your lives and engage in a conversation about identity, purpose, and the fragile beauty of being human? The play blurs the line between fiction and reality, weaving poetic dialogue and absurdist humour into a sharp critique of societal constructs. Ideas that will linger long after the final bow and you may want to drop out of your degree to live a monastic life.
- February 2025
“A pioneering work of theatrical reportage and a powerful stage event.” —Time.
In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming was found tied to a barbed wire fence in the town of Laramie, Wyoming. His murder — a hate crime, where he was targeted for being gay — brought international attention to hate crime legislation, inspired legislation across the United States at the state and federal level.
This LGBTQ+ History Month, the Pembroke Players & the Cambridge Union Society present The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project. In this seminal work of verbatim theatre, Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project draw on hundreds of interviews with Laramie residents, news reports, and journal entries, collated over a year and a half, exploring the impact of Matthew's death in Laramie.
The Laramie Project explores the depths to which humanity can sink — and remains as important as ever to this day.
