- 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
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
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.
- 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.
- February 2025
It's a smoker: this time with pink balloons and all tickets go to Pink Week. Hooray!
- February 2025
24 hours to write a sketch show. Ideally, it's funny but honestly who's to say.
- January–February 2025
“What, you think philosophy, you think poetry harmless, sir? Sir, it can maim, it can mutilate, blinded for centuries, it can kill.”
A dark summer, 1816, on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva, a utopia is born. This utopia is one built on free love, on unfettered immorality, on shadowy philosophies built to encase reality, to shield from the consequences of any misdeeds.
Here, in this thundery paradise, shelter the radical poets Bysshe and Byron, accompanied by their respective mistresses, Mary and Claire, and the frustrated physician, Polidori, who joins to shadow his sometime lover and document this sundry menagerie of Shelley’s devotees.
But no paradise can last forever, and a storm is coming.
- November 2024
What exactly is the difference between a medieval monk and a modern-day academic? ...Shockingly, nothing. Or at least that's the conclusion Mary, a troubled new student at Cambridge University, has come to after a shockingly traumatic first few weeks of term.
Raunchy, irreverent, and biblically brilliant, "Me and My Year of Casual 'Monasticism'" invites audiences to question if they really are both a madonna AND a whore.
- November 2024
This freshers' pantomime brings a ~fresh(ers)~ twist to The Wizard of Oz, as we follow Dorothy Gale - a Northern working-class girl who dreams of going to uni down south, 'somewhere over the Midlands'. Whisked away by a cyclone (thanks global warming!) to the land of Oz, she travels to the Emerald City of Cambridge and discovers university isn’t quite the fairy tale she imagined...
When tasked by the Wizard of Oz - the mysterious Vice-Chancellor who rules Cambridge - to defeat the Wicked Witch of the Southwest at her second home in Cornwall, Dorothy sets out with her friends - a brainless Scarecrow, a heartless Tin Man, and the Cowardly Bear - to navigate a strange and mysterious land: the South, following the Yellow Brick Railway Line (or rail replacement service!) wherever she goes.
Packed with gags, audience interaction, and relatable themes of belonging and self-discovery, this panto reminds us all that it’s okay to feel out of place. With both snarky satire and heartfelt moments, The Wizard of Oz is a celebration of the freshers' experience - there’s truly no place like home ("Oh, yes there is!").
- November 2024
‘…but I am a blazon. I would be on fire so to know I am whole.’
This psychological horror-comedy balances the levity of farcical delusion with the ground shaking impact of psychosis on perceived reality, truth and what it means to love. Fluctuating between scenes in an imagined church council and Lynchian arguments behind curtains, we see the story of Anthony: a man circling between derealisation and disembodiment in the face of trauma. Folie Circulaire is a genre-challenging exploration of self-destruction which questions whether mental illness can ever exonerate abuse.
- November 2024
In the last Pembroke Players Comedy event of this turn, it's another classic stand-up night!
- November 2024
'Because the stories we tell ourselves about what we do and what happens to us - that's the only truth that matters. That's the only thing we do know.'
Mind: The Gap follows Murph and Niamh during the aftermath of a car crash which killed the driver, their friend Neil, after his drink was tampered with on a night out. Suffering with memory loss linked to the crash, Murph grapples with his potential responsibility for Neil's death, clashing with his internal monologue, Frank, who strongly believes Murph to be innocent.
However, on meeting Cait - a mysterious commuter with a hauntingly familiar background - Murph becomes mistrustful of both Frank and Niamh's versions of events. As the boundary between Murph's mind and the outside world becomes less certain, he must remember the story behind how Neil died - and perhaps more crucially, why - before the truth is rewritten for him.
- November 2024
“We are only what we always were but naked now.”
A dramatized and partially fictionalised story of the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. John Proctor, a farmer, and his wife Elizabeth are a troubled couple, haunted by Proctor's past affair with Abigail Williams, who still harbours feelings for him. Reverend Hale is called upon to investigate the claims of witchcraft. Proctor struggles with his guilt over his affair and his desire to protect his wife and the truth.
In a town crying witchcraft, Proctor must make a choice between integrity and self-preservation.
- November 2024
The Bootleg Lecture Series is a very silly spin on the scourge that plagues every uni student: back-to-back lectures. We’re hosting comedians to present mock lectures on any topic they choose - whether that is a particularly humorous element of their degree or another inane topic of their choosing.
As we are based in Pembroke (obviously), we are also very lucky to have access to our new auditorium that we hope to fill with 24 carat comedic gold. We invite you to have fun with this concept and take it to whatever extremes you see fit. Think of it as a big ol’ smoker with PowerPoints and a kind of structure.
We are very happy to announce that this event will also be in partnership with The Brain Tumour Charity.
- November 2024
Women aren't funny - discuss.
- October–November 2024
Othello is a play of many complexities and layers. A play that tests the capacities individuals will go to upkeep their reputation and external image in society. The setting of Pembroke Chapel (never been performed in before) and it's black and white flooring, shows the mixing of cultures in a society in which race never does blur into one because of societal expectations. Set against the backdrop of the glitz and glamour of the 1920s, this interpretation of Shakespeare's much loved tragedy highlights the superficiality of society.
Rated 4 stars in student publication Varsity: 'Tally Arundell has directed an energetic production which is well-worth watching while it is on'
