- February 2023
Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have The 39 Steps, a fast-paced whodunit for anyone who loves comedy! In The 39 Steps, a man with a boring life meets a woman with a thick accent who says she’s a spy. When he takes her home, she is murdered. Soon, a mysterious organisation called “The 39 Steps” is hot on the man’s trail in a nationwide manhunt that climaxes in a death-defying finale! A riotous blend of virtuoso performances and wildly inventive stagecraft, the play is also packed with over 150 characters (played by a cast of four), an onstage plane crash, handcuffs, missing fingers, and some good old-fashioned romance!
- February 2023
Thirty-five years ago, all the fish disappeared. No one knows where. No one knows how. No one knows why.
In a hearing committee on Capitol Hill, three Senators are still searching for answers.
- February 2023
On midsummer's eve, 1889, in the count's kitchen, Miss Julie asks her valet to dance.
"He's trembling, the big strong boy... with arms like that..."
Miss Julie introduces two characters who are at war with themselves and their positions in life.
Julie, whose strange behaviour makes her the subject of gossip, has just left her fiance. She is unable to face her family and ill at ease with members of her own class.
Jean is an ambitious valet. Loosely affianced to Christine, a servant, he is drawn to Julie although he knows that she brings risks.
Helen Cooper's version of Strindberg's absurdist and confrontational play is coming to Pembroke New Cellars Week 3 Lent Term.
- November 2022
- November 2022
Jude can’t pray. In fact, every time she tries to pray, she blacks-out and wakes up masturbating. But when her mother falls ill, everything gets slightly less funny, no less absurd and a lot more complicated. Combining punk theatricality with dry humour and a deeply human focus, I Can’t Pray is a unique and exciting piece of new writing by Laurie Ward. Previous praise for Laurie’s writing include: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟‘incredibly emotive’ - Three Weeks / 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 ‘genuine originality…daring’ - Varsity.
Free glass of wine included in the ticket price
- November 2022
- November 2022
Rebekah King's nationally acclaimed one-woman production is about a Neolithic girl whose family have gone out into the snow searching for their missing herd, leaving her to guide them home with her voice. She tells us stories about her family, her dreams and ideas, and all the while the Thing Without a Face watches, and waits.
Premiered at National Student Drama Festival 2021
Winner of Pembroke Players Playwriting Competition 2020
Performed at Brighton Fringe 2022
- November 2022
- November 2022
“I was thinking last night, you know, you should make a film of Alice in Wonderland! I could play Alice. But we should make it terribly modern and - beautiful, sort of. About this city and us and everything. The city feels like a rabbit hole sometimes, don't you think? It's - It's easy to fall into.”
Al is an artist. He wants money and fame.
Bea is a writer. She wants artistic success.
Cee is a model. She just wants to dissolve.
The unusual death of an acquaintance shakes the lives of three artists struggling in the whirling dreamspace of 60s London. As they set out on individual but overlapping quests for fame, money and meaning, dreams and reality start to blur together, tumbling down the rabbit hole. Part Warhol's Factory, part Alice's Wonderland, the world of the play explores the imbalanced power dynamics between male artists and their female muses, set in the dreamy speedy velvety underground of the city, where art is everything and reality is an afterthought.
- November 2022
Do the words “Beep Test”, “Gifted and Talented programme” and “Show and Tell” evoke a visceral reaction in you? If so, take a trip with us Back To School! From sports day to pizza Fridays, this brand-new sketch show will teleport you back to the good old days of primary and secondary school, dredging up those all of those childhood and adolescent memories which have been buried… for good reason.
- October 2022
- October 2022
- December 2021
Pembroke Players are back with their first smoker of the year, featuring some of Cambridge's very best stand-up comics!
- March 2021
Left alone while her family searches for the missing herd, a Neolithic girl seeks comfort in imaginary friends. As she fills the cave with stories, the reality of isolation starts to take its toll, and The Thing Without a Face is drawing closer all the while...
This is an audio-immersive production that invites the audience to turn their own room into the cave in which this strange and beautiful story of loneliness and solidarity takes place.
- February 2021
NEVER SEEN BEFORE COMEDY.
Literally, they are attempting some comedy for the Very First Time. Comedy Virgins, if you will.
Anyway, come along, see how awesome these performers are and validate the weird way we've named this night! Thank you!
- November 2020
Why is the floor sticky?
Was jam involved?
Does it matter that the floor is sticky since it's an online show anyway?
Tune in for the annual Sticky Floor Smoker, where the comedy will be virtual, but the laughter will be real. This year featuring everyone's kitchen (or college-insurance-policy-compatible-gyp-room-alternative) floors as we broadcast to you live from many locations :o :o
- November 2020
“The Chairs” by famous French absurdist writer Eugène Ionesco is a tragi-comic farce about an elderly couple who host a dinner party for invisible guests. A 3 person play, this chair-induced fever dream of a play is looking for a creative and (dare I say it) “zany” prod team and cast to bring this weird and wonderful show to life.
A Week 6 show funded by Pembroke Players, this will run for three nights in the unique location of the Storey’s Field Centre and will be both performed for a real-life audience and live-streamed!
- October 2020
As part of Black History Month, we are working with the Pembroke College BAME officer to put together a showcase of Black artists ! We would love for people to get involved with anything they would like to perform – this could be poetry readings, monologues, spoken word, anecdotes, dance or anything you would like to bring to us!
- October 2020
Pembroke Smokers are back!
Get yourself some wine or other beverage, some snacks if you're hungry, some snacks if you're not hungry, and settle in for a night of comedy to welcome in the new academic rigour ahem I mean academic year. Sorry.
The smoker will now be online with a link sent to you to see our fabulous performers live from the comfort of your own room.
- July–August 2020
“When the sun burns warm above,
A maiden’s mind goes straight to love”
‘Madame Bovary’ follows Emma, a bookish young woman, from her engagement to accomplished - but ultimately uninteresting - doctor Charles Bovary and traumatic pregnancy to scandalous encounters with volatile lovers and an eventual, devastating bankruptcy.
This tragic tale of the loss of agency, of companionship, and ultimately of the self through marriage and motherhood in 19th century France speaks directly and importantly to our contemporary experiences of loneliness and isolation. Emma’s dry observation and shrewd commentary becomes our own - as Flaubert famously declared of his plucky protagonist: “C’est moi”.
Experience the beloved realist classic like never before in this new, student-written radio play. Adapted from a script first performed in Pembroke New Cellars in 2019, this production reworks Flaubert's narrative, with a distinct focus on the value and power of the female voice.
- June 2020
A virtual musical revue about relationships, isolation, and longing.
- March 2020
Live from Pembroke New Cellars, it's Saturday night...! From the team behind the five-star, sell-out production of Doctor Whom comes a brand-new-for-one-night-only panel show of games, quizzes and calamitous comedy featuring some of Cambridge Theatre's finest new performers.
- March 2020
For the final smoker of the term, we're throwing a big ol' party!
When: Friday 6th March, doors open at 9:30pm
Where: Pembroke Old Library
What: Comedy, wine, other soft drinks, music, laughter
Who: You!
Why: It'll be fun! I promise!
Dress code: black tie with a 1920's twist ;)
So Charleston your way down to the Old Library for a night of music, colour, wine and comedy!
- March 2020
Chance, we've got to go on.
Go on to where? I couldn't go past my youth, but I've gone past it
Alexandra Del Lago, ageing actress of the Silver Screen, and her escort, Chance Wayne, end their month-long bender in St Cloud, Missouri. While the actress has been fleeing from her suspected failed comeback to the screen, Chance is returning to his hometown. He seeks the glory, the fame and the girl he knew from his youth, however, time and corruption threaten him from every angle.
- March 2020
1896. Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet, when the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a ‘blue stocking’ – an unnatural, educated woman. They are denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.
Blue Stockings follows Tess, Carolyn, Maeve, and Celia through their tumultuous first year at Girton College where they are not only faced with the systematic barriers of misogyny and the cruelty of the class divide that further dictates their right to learn, but also fall in love with the very same boys that brand them as inferior.
- February 2020
Keep good Gawain and ready for the test; be prepared to play the lethal game but for now take your rest.
The mysterious Green Knight arrives at Camelot and lays forth a challenge: any may take the Green Knight's axe and strike him provided he may return the blow in one years time. Gawain accepts and beheads the Green Knight with a single stroke. Gawain does not fear reprisal until the Green Knight stands, picks up his head and reminds Gawain of the promise he made. One year later as he goes into the wilderness of nature, Gawain enters a world wonders and strangeness.
- February 2020
Climb aboard a scarlet steam engine and travel to a haunted castle in the Scottish Highlands for an enchanting and legally safe sketch show which may or may not be parodying a certain book and movie franchise about a certain boy wizard.
- February 2020
"I can't know you in one hundred and forty."
"Try."
How do you communicate under a law which limits your speech to 140 words a day? Bernadette and Olive meet at a cat's funeral and steadily move towards the realisation that, for all their attempts at Morse code, contractions and telling stories with their eyes, something was already lost in translation between them long before the Hush Law was passed.
- February 2020
First time performers, first rate comedy. After 2 sell out shows last term join us for our first smoker of the new year!
- February 2020
Join DOCTOR WHOM for a wibbly-wobbly adventure across time and space as they traverse the cosmos with their impressionable sidekick and talking robot dog. However, disaster strikes from an unexpected place when Doctor Whom defeats all their enemies for good, ridding the universe of all evil. Facing an identity crisis and long-long-long-term retirement, the Doctor must reckon with their greatest enemy: themselves.
"Stylish, fact-paced, and genuinely funny ... beg, borrow, or use your sonic screwdriver to wrangle a ticket to this whimsical take on the classic series. You won’t be sorry. ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐" - The Tab
- November 2019
‘Mais la raison n’est pas ce qui règle l’amour/But reason does not govern love.’ Molière
The Cambridge Annual French Play: a radically avant-garde and minimalist modernization of one of the most influential French plays ever written. The first time Cambridge has ever done a truly bilingual play; simultaneously in French and English and with no subtitles.
Protagonist Alceste, member of the glitterati, despises his world’s insincerity and puts up an epic struggle against the calculating rules of the fame game. Disillusioned with humanity itself and increasingly unpopular, he ironically falls in love with the epitome of the world he detests: the flirtatious and flighty Célimène, a feisty gossip columnist/part-time feminist. Watch a hilarious debacle over a critical poetry review taken to Kafkaesque extremes when Alceste is put on trial for his cruel but honest criticism (in the form of a Facebook dislike). A play about reputation, and a satire of the 21st century media, journalism and Hollywood culture, putting Sartre's thesis that we only exist in the eyes of others to the test.
In short, a rattling good yarn.
- November 2019
Why is the floor sticky?
Is that a good thing?
Who's going to clean it later?
For the answers to these questions and, just as importantly, free wine(!) come down to Pembroke New Cellars on Sunday for the 2nd Smoker of the year!
- October–November 2019
Trurl and Klapaucius are two of the greatest inventors the galaxy has ever seen. However, unparalleled as they are, there often comes a point where their creations tend to get the better of them...
A new adaptation inspired by the short stories of Stanisław Lem, Fables for Robots is an assorted medley of nuts and bolts, presented in the shiniest chromium physical theatre format for your viewing pleasure. Join Trurl and Klapaucius as they set off on a genre-spanning journey, from sci-fi to philosophy to surrealist comedy, and race through the universe in series of self-edifying quests. Tremble before the rambunctious robotic monarch King Krool; gasp in awe at the intergalactic intransigence of Pirate Pugg; weep at the beatific musical stylings of Trurl's electronic bard; hearken back to a time when we still dreamed of a future full of promise, wonder, and tinfoil spaceships.
We present to you - Fables for Robots.
- October 2019
"Mum, mum, dad, PLEASE can we go to the FRESHER'S SMOKER?"
"Yeah please mum!"
"There's even FREE WINE!"
Fresher's week smoker is BACK, so buy your tickets and bring your kids down to New Cellars on Friday!
- March 2019
'Chewing Gum: A Sketch Show' is an hour of the freshest, mintiest, hubba hubba bubba bubbliest comedy around! Get ready to pop, lock and polka dot, as we go full Violet Beauregarde and chomp down on the things we love to love, or even love to hate.
- February 2019
‘How does it feel?’ presents an hour of perspectives that are not often heard. Written and performed by LGBTQ+ people who feel their identities and experiences are under-represented or not well-known, it promises to be be warm, funny, informative, emotional, fresh and -- most of all -- honest.
From stand-up and sketch comedy to personal stories, naturalism to absurdity, the show will be a space for people to express themselves in their own terms. We hope you come away laughing, thinking and feeling in ways you might not have expected.
