- January 2021
N.B. this show has been cancelled
“If we are all eternal, and if Human Life is only the first mile in a billion, do you honestly believe that God could abandon any mothahfuckah so soon in the journey?”
In purgatory, a court case is being heard against Judas Iscariot, the notorious betrayer of Jesus Christ. Witnesses from across history are invited to give their testimonies. Was it a terrible crime, or was it a necessary part of God’s great plan?
Set in a time-bending, seriocomically imagined courtroom where saints talk streets slang and lawyers barter with Satan, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is an ambitious philosophical meditation on religion. The play alternates between riotously funny and deeply thought-provoking, revealing at its heart profound reflections on human fallibility, guilt and forgiveness.
Regardless of your faith-or lack thereof-you may discover a new gem or two from a two-millennia-old story.
- January 2021
N.B. this show has been cancelled
The House Is Now Open is a student-written comedy play focusing on Endre, a chaotic fresher who accidentally commits to two shows on the same night. Written by two third years who've experienced their fair share of unfortunate theatrical mishaps, this play within a play exposes once and for all the true meaning behind the phrase, 'the show must go on'.
4 days until the dissertation deadline. 3 hours of sleep. 2 shows on the same night…
and 1 over-committed student actor, who has somehow ended up in both.
Overwhelmed by the stresses of uni life, Endre discovers that the two plays he’s been rehearsing for are happening on the same night. At the same time.
The house is now open….
Determined not to let his friends down, Endre finds himself running between both shows, juggling the jetés of Shakespearian dialogue alongside the iambs of contemporary dance.
As tensions rise, Endre takes the ‘quick change’ to a whole new level, and hopes no one becomes suspicious of his unusually long toilet breaks.
Will he pull it off? Will his fellow cast mates manage the mishaps of opening night on their own? Will he miss that all important cue line?
All the world’s a stage, but this player needs a break!
- January 2021
YOU Split the votes! YOU Split the show!
Split is a fast paced panel show with various comedy rounds. The panel have live and pre-recorded tasks that you as the audience vote on to split the winnings. There are also opportunities to mess with the show, your suggestions are always valid and we will strive to improvise with them as much as possible. Come mess us up, come split the show!
- January 2021
ETG’s 2020 production of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of forbidden love, sets the fateful events within a school classroom, these famous characters reimagined as modern-day students, parents and teachers. This familiar world exposes both the joy of young love and the horror of unnecessary violence in their extremes. This student company hopes to reinvigorate this well-known and well-loved text by drawing new focus to loss of hope and innocence, the consequences of generational actions, and ultimately what it means to be young in today’s world.
While this year's tour has sadly been cancelled due to COVID-19, Romeo and Juliet will complete its run at the start of Lent Term, with additional matinees to be streamed to schools to uphold the society's commitment to education and theatre.
- December 2020
Hip hip hooray – it’s Show Choir’s 10th birthday!
To celebrate, we will be performing some of your favourite Show Choir anthems from across the decade, from absolute classics like Don’t Stop Believin’ and Fame, to all the cheesy hits you love to hate – Call Me Maybe or Wake Me Up Before You Go Go anyone?
Don’t Stop Us Now as we boogie our way into our 10th fabulous year, grab your dancing shoes and your party hats and come along and join us for some slick harmonies, killer choreography and an hour of hilarious musical fun! See you there!
- December 2020
N.B. this show has been cancelled
The folktales of the Mabinogion are some of the oldest and strangest in the literature of the British Isles, telling the mystical stories of ancient Wales; in this world, children have been known to turn into fish, and a wizardly mouse may well cast a spell on you. Mabinogion follows the birth and life of King Pryderi - whose name translates to modern-day English as 'Anxiety' - as he contends with mysterious deerlike visitors from the Otherworld, battling the undead armies of the Irish, and a rather heated argument with a neighbour over a herd of pigs. This show reimagines the four branches of the Mabinogi for a present day audience, and our merry troupe of performers will be using song, puppetry, and comedy to sift through the surreal stories of Pryderi of Dyfed and present them in fantastical ways such as you've never seen the likes of before. From the minds behind Fables for Robots ('a space of vibrancy and innovation... a performance that is genuinely refreshing' - The Cambridge Student, ****).
Mae tegell yn ferwi and ty'n barod.
- November 2020
N.B. this show has been cancelled
After our sell-out-one-night run in Lent, The Great(ER) Cambridge Panel Show returns to storm the ADC Theatre!
- November 2020
Grab your mulled wine and mince pies, and join us for our first livestreamed quiz!
We'll have six rounds of festive, theatre-themed questions to test your knowledge, hosted by the management of the ADC. Everyone is welcome - you can play along at home with your household, or get your friends together to form a team over Zoom!
- November 2020
N.B. this show has been cancelled
It's a murder mystery... in space!
- November 2020
OUR LAST SMOKER OF THE TERM!! WHAT?! HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?! Catch our live-stream of some of the finest comedy Cambridge has to offer and get those giggles in whilst you still can! The Cambridge Footlights bring you an hour of brilliant comedy, ranging from sketch, to stand-up, comedy song, monologues, or maybe dance. Whatever the style, it's always 'uproariously funny' (Varsity).
- November 2020
N.B. this show has been cancelled
- November 2020
N.B. this show has been cancelled
Join three hapless criminals as they attempt the heist of their lives: stealing the Crown Jewels. Watch as they assemble their team, plot their path, and even fall in love on the way. Will they swagger off with the swag, or be swept up in the long arms of the law? Either way, irresistible tunes and uproarious comedy guarantee a criminally good time.
- November 2020
"What makes you who you are? A name? An address? A random collection of experiences, a few memories?... You are who you can prove you are. And that's the easiest thing in the world to change." When a young executive reaches breaking point and decides to disappear, he pays a visit to a master of the craft in a seafront fortune tellers in Southend. Haunted by visitations from a pathologist who swears he is already lying flat out on her slab, he begins a nightmarish journey to the edge of existence that sees him stripped of everything that made him who he was.
- November 2020
Two lusty young troublemakers with overbearing dads do their best to have a shag despite the threat of strict parental disapproval. Hilarious consequences ensue, such as tasteless groping, clumsy flirtation, awful hangovers and several totally avoidable deaths.
Kind of almost like one of those Shakespeare arrangements.
- November 2020
The Cambridge Footlights bring you a hilarious hour of comedy from our incoming Freshers - Freshers by age, by nature, by the fact that THIS is their first foray into the world of Cambridge comedy! Get ready to laugh and cry (because you're laughing so much) at these comedy 'virgins'' stand-up, sketch, song and character comedy - all from the comfort of your very own live-stream!
- November 2020
Ordinary Days is a powerful musical depicting the lives of four New Yorkers finding through life and the city. An unlikely friendship is formed by an uptight grad student and an eccentric artist over a lost notebook and a lack of purpose. Meanwhile, a dysfunctional couple struggle to make ends meet as one wants to start afresh and the other desperately clings onto the past. Their lives intertwine through a vibrant and exciting score while the audience is taken on an adventure of self discovery by each character.
- October 2020
Following the success of last year's 'Things That Go Bump N' Grind In The Night' Dragtime! is back again with another hour of cabaret fun and this time it's even spookier :O :O :O Cambridge's premiere drag troupe return to the ADC with their second Halloween show, presenting the best new drag talent the city has to offer. Hold on to your seats as Dragtime!'s kings, queens and inbetweens take you on a thrill-inducing ride through the dark side of drag, featuring singing, lip sync, spoken word, pole dance, burlesque, live music and more!
- October 2020
William Shakespeare's Macbeth
- October 2020
For TWO NIGHTS ONLY, the ADC will play host to a cabaret night like no other... CUMTS presents: The Spotlight!!
Watch in awe as ten of Cambridge's most talented musical theatre performers take to the new venue of the ADC STAGE to belt out a wide range of their favourite songs from the shows! In a term without Bar Nights (we know, we cried too), this is a completely unique chance to experience the staggering breadth of ability across all year groups and theatrical backgrounds. The phrase 'not to be missed' is often overused, but never has there been such an incredible and unexpected opportunity to add some much-needed MT levity to your life - why would you want to be anywhere else?
- October 2020
Join the next generation of Cambridge comedians as we make you relive all the awkward moments of your first terms at Cambridge; from the first Freshers’ mingle to embarrassing yourself while drunk to midnight trips to Van of Life. Entirely created by newly born second years ready to share their nightmare Fresher scenarios. Reminisce with your friends over the journey from having “Down it Fresher!” shouted at you at every night out, to being a Cindies veteran.
- October 2020
The Cambridge Footlights extend a warm welcome BACK TO SCHOOL with our first Smoker of the term and the year ! Expect the same hilarious hour of sketch, stand-up, songs and character comedy with faces new and old - this time, live-streamed to your very own bed! Get that boxed wine and popcorn out and prepare to laugh and giggle and roar at some of the finest comedy Cambridge has to offer!
- October 2020
As the first mainstream lesbian piece of theatre, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove is a seminal work that explores a gay women’s haven, Bluefish Cove, where a group of seven lesbians are spending their annual holiday. Eva wanders into the colony after leaving an unhappy marriage, accidentally finding herself among women that will change her life in more ways than she could ever envisage. Set in the 1980s, this tender play follows these women as they experience love, loss, and everything in between: rooted in subtle and realistic portrayals of lesbian relationships, it invites us to consider love between women in whatever form that may take.
- October 2020
FORGIVE ME, I HAVE SOME BAD HABITS
Grit your teeth, take a breath and prepare to be sucked into The Confession Booth.
Now un-grit them and let out that breath because really, it was unnecessary to ‘confess’ to Father Monahan that they brought down StockPhotos by photoshopping Herbie’s grandma’s toe into the logo.
‘Sinners’ - a saucy, spicy and slightly comedy show about confessions
- October 2020
We've all heard of sticking it to The Man, so it only seems right that through this series of character monologues, Cambridge's finest lady and non-binary comics will do just that, on stage, for every gender's viewing pleasure.
This is the perfect showcase to portray the hilarity, strength, weirdness, wonderfulness, bravery, and all the many more things a woman/non-binary person can be. Stockings are bringing The Man Presents: Women back to its basic, initial format as all of these characters come together to stick it to their male writer, the one who ineptly branded them as what he 'thought' a woman character should be (read: quite frankly, written badly).
With multiple womxn actually allowed on stage at once, who knows what might happen? We wager it will be something very, very funny.
This is Good Girls, Written Bad(ly).
- October 2020
There are a million ways we could die at any given moment—the guy next door could turn out to be a serial killer, or the water supply could be tainted with e. coli. Not to mention threats of nuclear war and the impending doom of climate disaster that could wipe out humankind at any second. But either we can live in constant fear -- or we can laugh at the absurdity of it all.
This musical comedy centers on the experience of a ragtag support group who call themselves “Survivors Non-Anonymous,” joining together to share their varied stories of survival. But when the bunker they’re meeting in suddenly goes on lockdown, trapping them inside with no resources and leaving them with no idea of the cause of the lockdown, the group members are left to combine their talents and do what they do best: survive.
From the sell-out writing team behind What's Wrong With Me? and Life With You comes a wacky new musical comedy about survival, friendship, and the importance of the Heimlich maneuver.
- May 2020
After a sold-out one-night run in the Larkum in Lent, VOYAGER is returning as the Easter Week 3 ADC Lateshow- a dark, claustrophobic play about the inside of a government office during a disease outbreak in a near-future Britain.
It's five o'clock on a Friday night at the Department of Health, in a near-future Britain in which everything is going wrong. Anna, working on paper files amid power cuts, is part of a team trying to isolate and contain a strange and terrible new disease. Quarantines and social media blocks are in place to stop word of it getting out, but tonight it's in five cities and no-one knows how or why. By morning there might be riots and cities alight.
And beneath Anna's office, in a darkened cell, is a girl who might know something about the disease, who went missing for a year and was found just as the disease flared up. But the girl won't talk, and as the pressure mounts and the body count outside rises, Anna will have to make a terrible choice.
- May 2020
'Kenny Shallows has always dreamt of being a poolside lifeguard. But when he wangles a place on the prestigious lifeguarding course at Hardwater Leisure Centre (biggest in Britain if you count the car park!), he finds he is a small fish in a big pond. Can our underdog stay afloat when thrown in at the deep end? Or will he lose his trunks, get chlorine in his eyes, and swim into the ladder? It's sink or swim, dunk or be dunked, splish or splash.'
Pool Noodles is the debut narrative sketch show from new company Chuck Salmon. Join Footlights alumni Noah, Will, and Alex as they make a splash with their own brand of original, endearing, and ridiculous storytelling. As heard on BBC Radio 4.
'Captivatingly creative, impressively energized and frankly just very, very funny.' - Varsity (4.5 stars)
'A glimpse into the future of British comedy.' - TCS (5 stars)
- April–May 2020
There must have been a moment, at the beginning where we could have said ‘no’
But somehow we missed it
Two friends wake up with no memory. They are swept up in the events of someone else’s tragedy and left to suffer their own - alone. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.
This imaginative new production of Stoppard’s first play examines how it feels to be cut adrift. Afraid and alone, the pair are trapped in the spotlight. Yet their fate is written and creeps closer and closer...
- March 2020
Corpsing is an absurd, haunting dark comedy about the politics surrounding family, grief and how death is understood across cultures, written by Shameera - a very-non-white Malaysian of mixed heritage - and Jamie, whom she calls ‘one of the whitest guys’ she knows.
What happens after we die? For Christina, the answer comes as a shock: nothing. No gateway guarded by an old bearded white man, no ascension into a beam of light, no dark tunnels. Instead, she’s left exactly where she was before – in her body, lying on a hospital bed, her mother just outside the door. There’s clearly been a mistake.
And as she is carted around – interned in a morgue, taken to a funeral home and finally carried through her own funeral – she can’t help but see the absurdity of the situation. From her mother’s insistence that Christina is to blame for this terrible event, to her aunt’s sudden professions of love, to the funeral director’s pretensions to the status of an auteur, and finally to the shambolic religious pick-n-mix of the funeral itself, it becomes clear that the living are far stranger than the dead.
Most of the time, though, she’s just bored. There isn’t much to do when your nerves are no longer firing.
As she observes her own last rites, she is forced to come to terms with the relationships she has left behind. She watches as her family – her confusing, smothering, chaotic, spiteful, beautiful, hilarious family– quickly expose their badly-hidden cultural divides and internal politics.
She slowly realises what she has been trying to hide from: her family, her complicated heritage, and most of all the reality of her own mortality.
- March 2020
- March 2020
Hailed as the perfect musical comedy, Guys and Dolls transports us to 1950’s New York, a world of gamblers, gangsters and nightclub singers, and missionaries. A tale about finding love in all the wrong places, it follows Nathan Detroit as he tries to find the cash to set up the biggest crap game in town, all the while with the authorities breathing down his neck; meanwhile, his girlfriend, Adelaide, laments their long-standing engagement. To secure the funds for the location, Nathan bets Sky, a high-rolling gambler, that he can’t take the “doll” of Nathan’s choosing to Havana; and chooses straight-talking and straight-laced Evangelist Sergeant Sarah Brown. In the ensuing chaos, Guys And Dolls takes us from the heart of Times Square to the cafes of Havana, Cuba, and even into the sewers of New York City, but eventually everyone ends up right where they belong.
- March 2020
They say third time's the charm, although the first two times were pretty charming too!
Join us for Comic Sans Men Again when we return to grace the ADC stage with an hour of hilarity, without a script or a man in sight. Roman used to think that women couldn't be funny. Roman doubted that comedy could be made up on the spot. Silly Roman. Now the time's new, Roman.
- March 2020
Twenty fabulous stars will be born tonight as the CU Show Choir bring you another shiny bright evening of slick harmonies, killer choreography, and some of your favourite pop tunes!
From Beyonce and P!nk, to Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga, embrace your inner pop diva and raise your glass to another awesome end to term with us!
Come along and reach for the stars! You know you won't regret it!
- March 2020
The very essence of family is called into question when fortunes are on the line.
Aging patriarch and CEO Lear divides his thriving business empire among his three daughters. Requiring only their professions of love as evidence of their proficiency, Cordelia fails the test and is ruthlessly disinherited, leaving Regan and Goneril to their own devices. In turn, the two sisters are forced to reckon with their father's inability to relinquish control, as they struggle against his ever-tightening grip. Meanwhile, Edmund, the illegitimate son of Gloucester, Lear’s business partner, chases what he believes to be his rightful inheritance. Deceiving his half-brother Edgar, and driving his father to the brink of madness, he seeks to right what nature has wronged.
When the two feuding families clash, and everyone's interests - and fortunes - are at stake, allegiances are broken and familial bonds betrayed.
- February 2020
An upbeat, mischievous, musical take on Shakespeare's oddest play. Immerse yourself in this quirky tale of love and envy, as separated lovers Imogen and Posthumus face down the misdeeds and machinations of the Queen, Cloten and the evil Jachimo, one of Shakespeare's finest villains. The brilliance of the Bard and the magic of musical theatre collide for a strange, absorbing, fantastical experience.
- February 2020
Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and Susan are childhood friends. Bound by their mutual love and hate, their lives remain interwoven from their shared school days and despite their divergent paths through adulthood. The Waves follows these six individual but irrevocably connected souls as they navigate their various experiences, their communal griefs, and their relationships to one another and the world around them.
The novel that Virginia Woolf called her 'play-poem' comes to the Cambridge stage for the first time, in a new adaptation which celebrates multimedia and physical theatre.
Now with a pre-show panel discussion featuring Professor Dame Gillian Beer, Dr Trudi Tate, and members of the production team on Friday 28th February.
