- July 2024
Henrietta Brown used to be an artist before the war but with her creative endeavours on hold and with a doctor husband and children who want to play their part in the war effort, her world is suddenly very different.
Join Henrietta as she shares letters with her childhood friend Robert who is serving in France. You and Robert will hear about the trials and tribulations, ups and down and laughter and tears of the community in this small seaside town during World War II. This very human and warm portrayal of life will draw you in and leave you feeling for an hour or so you have taken a small step back into another time.
This production is suitable for ages 12 and over.
- July 2024
You are invited to join Cupid, the legendary ‘God of Love’ on the ultimate true love learning experience. This beginner’s session will give you the opportunity to learn first-hand in the home of our selected couple. Witness them at the peak of their emotional connection, and only a few months away from their first anniversary, as they (unknowingly) demonstrate to you the basics of true love.
Whether you have or haven’t found the one yet, treat yourself to this extraordinary lesson on love from the source of love itself. And remember…nothing can go wrong when you’re in love.
This production is suitable for ages 16 and over.
- July 2024
You’re seven years old. Mum’s in hospital.
Dad says she’s "done something stupid". She finds it hard to be happy.
You start a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world.
Everything worth living for.
You leave it on her pillow.
You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling.
What is it like to live with a parent who doesn’t want to be here? Is it your fault? Can you do anything to make it better?
This is an amateur production in arrangement with Casarotto Ramsay and Associates
This production is suitable for ages 16 and over.
- July 2024
It's the summer of 1988. Tory politician Robin Hesketh returns to his idyllic home in the Cotswolds. It’s his birthday and, having successfully passed Section 28; effectively banning the 'promotion' of homosexuality in schools, he is in a celebratory mood. However, his welcome is not as he'd hoped.
Diana has a stinking hangover, a fox is destroying the garden, and secrets are being dug up all over the place. As the day draws on, what starts with the familiar rhythms of marital sparring quickly turns to blood-sport.
Historyonics Theatre Company presents Hansard, a witty and savage portrait of the governing class and the society at the time. Funny, tender, and ultimately brutal.
This amateur production of “Hansard” is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd. on behalf of Samuel French Ltd. www.concordtheatricals.co.uk
This production is suitable for ages 12 and over.
- June 2024
Coming soon to a Playroom near you! A new blockbuster film is on the horizon. What genre is it? What's the title? You decide!
Watch as this completely improvised movie is filmed before your eyes. And watch as it goes hilariously wrong! Between the film sets, quirky actors, stressed out directors and snarky crew all have their wacky personal dramas, leading to blockbuster disaster! Can they put aside their differences to save the film? Or will romance, rivalry and chaos drive this movie into ruin? Each night is a unique whirlwind of comedic drama, influenced by your suggestions. Get ready. Lights, camera...
- June 2024
- June 2024
CUADC EDINBURGH FRINGE SHOW 2024
They’re married. They just don’t know it yet. But this isn’t Vegas. It’s Slough…
Awoken by her birth control alarm in a messy hotel room, Poppy finds herself naked next to her ex who isn't really her ex, Freddie. The two struggle to piece together the events of the night before, gradually remembering the details until they reach the horrifying revelation that they are married. Sounds pretty rock-n-roll, right? But this isn't Vegas, this is a BnB in Slough. Stuck together in the honeymoon suite, Poppy and Freddie are forced to confront what went wrong between them and reconcile the differences that once forced them apart and, crucially, decide whether or not to get an annulment. Poppy and Freddie have an hour until they need to check out. What happens when a Scouser and a Kentish Maid wake up married? You'll have to wait and see...
FRINGE TICKETS: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/vegas
- May 2024
In this satirical black-comedy set in the mid-2000s, a traumatic career-ending injury splits the trajectories of two promising football academy bros, with Wesley Lennox becoming an arrogant sporting star, while his former best friend Tricky falls into a life of increasingly reckless football hooliganism. What happens when a no-nonsense nanny and a secret relationship enter the mix?
- May 2024
England, 1640s: The country is gripped by civil war and religious fervour. The Second Coming seems imminent, but no one can quite agree on how and when Christ will return, or what shape things will take in his kingdom on earth. But for a small group of utopian dreamers, ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary events around them, this apocalyptic outlook is one of hope, of radical unity, and of a new paradise. They are preachers, prophets, politicians, social outcasts, sinners, and saints, and they have a vision for a new and egalitarian world. But these Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters are not the only people who see England as a new Jerusalem in waiting, nor are they the only people with plans for society in a kingless England. Told in vignettes that veer from the grand to the intimate, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire uses the stories of common people swept up in the tides of history, religion, and utopian visions to ask questions that still resonate in the 21st century: what happens to the idealists on the losing side? Whose vision for the future is the one that must be followed? When does the political become religious and the religious political? And what do we really mean when we try to create heaven on earth?
- May 2024
3 lost souls wander aimlessly through the forest, before setting up camp for the night and telling each other stories to entertain them. Welcome your storytellers, a band of travelling figments of imagination who bring to life an array of British folklore, from simple to horrifying. Until the worlds and the monsters created within them return to bring the lost souls home.
- May 2024
Pack your boxers, tape your tits, break your voice and embrace the power of being a silly little man. Get roasted by the psychiatrist for your lack of rizz, get roasted by the national press for being too woke, get roasted by your friends for being bottom of the pecking order. (But there’s nothing wrong with being bottom, even without a prostate.)
Join Cambridge Footlight Kae Deller as he takes you on a madcap journey of trans-masculinity and self-discovery, a journey that will contain doctors, actors, politicians and, embarrassingly, Vulcans.
Warning: Sad monologue about the evils of transphobia not included.
- May 2024
There's my train - Good-bye.
Two strangers' chance encounter, or two lovers' final goodbye: two lives intersecting at Milford Junction station as the 5:43 train departs from the platform.
Still Life by Noël Coward is a deeply touching romance about a fleeting yet tentatively genuine love that provided the basis for the hit movie Brief Encounter in 1945. After meeting and falling in love at a suburban rail station, Alec and Laura meet every Thursday in the refreshment room over tea, debating between respectability or love, and some sentimental moments transpire before they must decide whether to take that leap in the dark.
A poignant tale of forbidden love, polite apologies, and a life left behind.
- May 2024
'The Palace' cabaret club, Berlin, sometime in the late 1920s. A drag performer, their faded mother, the controlling stepfather, a preacher who lives in the basement, a doorman and a patron.
This radical new adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'Salomé' tells the biblical story in place we've never seen it before as cabaret performer Salomé struggles to maintain her independence in an environment controlled by sex, seeking salvation in the baptist preacher Jonathan, only to be scorned as a "child of Sodom".
A visceral and gut-wrenching tragedy which explores the depths of rejection and fetishisation as queer person.
- May 2024
- May 2024
Before there were knights, there were idiots who thought swinging a sword and being a hero were pretty much interchangeable.
In this original quirky comedy, a group of medieval squires, led by dreamer Lance, grapple with the realities of their lowly existence. When a new squire, Phil, arrives, the group's mundane lives take an unexpected turn. Little do they know that Phil is short for Philippa, and she is running from a past that just might catch up to her.
While Phil tries to hide her identity from what is rapidly becoming the world’s most awkward love triangle, the squires get to work training for an upcoming tournament and engage in the classic debate of magic v. science. A series of disparate events, including inventing the concept of gravity (suck it da Vinci), spirals into a murder that demands an elaborate cover-up.
We are looking for a hilarious and formidable cast and crew for our Corpus run before heading to Fringe. If you are interested in being a part of our company for Cambridge, Edinburgh or both, please apply!
- May 2024
“Am I dying or just going mad?”
It can be uncomfortable to think about death, but when you’re locked in a room with a Corpse, it becomes unavoidable. When the Corpse starts talking to you, it becomes even more so. In a place where life and death can meet, talk, and eat cake together, a Woman and a Corpse get the opportunity to talk some things out, and try to teach each other something about mortality. They have until the sun comes up to fall a bit in love with life, the afterlife, and each other. This bittersweet reimagining of medieval dream vision literature will take you by the hand and gently ask you:
“What do you want to come next?”
For fans of cake, the macabre, and dancing with death.
- April–May 2024
Vignettes is a play of two halves: past and present, fever dream and reality, cause and effect. Frayed at their seams, however, the acts have an intimate yet strained relationship with one another- a tension present amongst the characters themselves. An unflinchingly all-access tour of a tortured psyche, the play tackles masculinity, sexuality, hereditary trauma, adolescence, the vital importance of art and the crushing burden of the past. Told through voices which ring out with continual authenticity, sometimes comfortingly, often chillingly, central to Vignettes is a poignant sense of realism; whilst often choosing to present itself in a surreal lens, the play has human tragedy at its core.
- April 2024
- March 2024
- March 2024
- March 2024
Every term, as part of its suite of new writing programmes, the Marlowe Society runs HATCH - a (sometimes) themed collage of the freshest new writing in Cambridge.
Apart from granting writers the opportunity to see their work put up on stage, it affords directors and actors the chance to easily hone their skills when interpreting scripts, and gives all three groups the chance to work together to create something special. HATCH is envisioned partly as a chance for people from the weekly Marlowe Writers’ Group to edit the writing exercises they have been working on and see them up on stage, but also for writers beyond Marlowe’s programmes to join the fold!
In line with the evening’s history as a low-stakes, relaxed opportunity to get involved with new writing - there will be no applications or auditions, and writers will be accepted on a rolling basis. What there will be are short pieces of new writing, and extracts from longer plays. And a lot of fun to be had by all, whether in the audience or on stage.
- March 2024
A cunning plan is coming to Cambridge…
Cambridge Does Comic Relief: Blackadder Goes Forth presents an adaption of the two best Blackadder episodes: Private Plane & Goodbyeee. You may disagree that these are the best, but you’d be wrong. Set in the trenches of the first world war, this black comedy follows Captain Blackadder's various attempts to escape his fate.
So come and see your favourites - General Melchett, Captain Flashheart, Darling and the rest - we're as excited as a very excited person who has a special reason to be excited for you to see us!
All profits will go to Comic Relief.
- March 2024
Adapted from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, this one-woman show is a closed event, celebrating the 40 Year Anniversary of Women's Matriculation at Corpus Christi College.
- March 2024
- March 2024
Death is at your door – she's only trying to tell you a knock-knock joke!
After a disappointing job interview with the Grim Reaper, Ariel Hebditch must take to the stage to pursue her second, far more stable career path of comedian. In her debut stand-up hour, your resident asexual goth takes you on a whistle-stop tour through her own personal haunted house. From werewolves to vampires to the devil herself, Skeleton Out of the Closet brings you a night of queer joy and the decidedly-more-hard-to-come-by gothic joy as your humerus entertainer promises you the time of your death!
- March 2024
"They've got no sense of what we're trying to achieve here!"
"You've gotta roll with it, you can't just hide yourself away!"
"For someone who's not the captain, you're doing a hell of a lot of captaining..."
It's the worst group project imaginable - and, it's in space.
From the writer of last year's Macroevolution: Variant B, KSOSES is a sci-fi comedy/drama about four astronauts trapped in a training simulation. Isala, Chenruth, Myraden, and Vos may all be individually gifted, but somehow, combined, they bring out the very worst in each other: sulking, pettiness, unbearable passive aggression - all this and much, much more. And, as if working together wasn't hard enough, something about their environment seems off... but how do you escape a simulation from the inside? Come for the sitcom, stay for the epic space adventure.
- March 2024
What's going on? Who am I? Who are you? What are you doing my house? Can you leave? All these questions and more will be answered (or not) in EUREKA!, a brand-new question themed sketch comedy show. We hope you leave the theatre more confused than ever before after an hour of mind-melting comedy, because if there's one thing Cambridge is known for, it's pointless and stupid shenanigans! I think...
- February 2024
What if you code-switch so hard
That you just switch?
That it just becomes the code?
What do you get when you put a Black-British Caribbean working-class woman in a predominantly white institution that seems to be praying on her downfall?
An identity crisis, that’s what.
‘Blackboard’ follows Adina, a headstrong, politically-minded 18-year-old starting her first term at the prestigious Fawcett institute, as she struggles to reconcile her attendance there with her identity. Watch as she attempts to navigate academia, friendship, love, and what seems to be an endless sea of microaggressions while the judging voices of her friends, her melodramatic inner-voice, and the enigmatic Black Council echo.
Will she crumble under the unbearable weight of impostor syndrome and ignorance? Will she remain true to her values, keeping her ‘Black Card’? And what’s up with the mysterious blackboard that seems to track her every mistake?
- February 2024
Liminal Space is Dominika Wiatrowska’s (almost) one-woman show about growing up in Poland, learning English as a second language and moving to the UK alone at the age of sixteen. Join her at the Corpus Playroom for an hour of storytelling, dance, and celebration of Slavic culture.
Learn answers to your burning questions, including: Which city's statue of Jesus reaches higher than that of Rio de Janeiro? How could we redefine the word 'prolific'? And how does it feel like to live life in a Liminal Space?
- February 2024
What do a sham poet, Count Dracula and the London MET have in common? Doggerel is a new comedy play written by Miles Hitchens, which considers the problem of authorship, how words are liable to take on lives of their own and the factors that go into interpreting them. The late Victorian poet Vincent Conquest is struggling to make ends meet. His customers believe his verse to be the key that will reveal their future lives, and he believes he’s fallen to the worst fate a poet can get, the writer of doggerel. That is until the mysterious Count Sorin finds the writings, holding them to be a bona fide confession of vampiredom. The spontaneous scribbler is now implicated in a revenge plot against Bram Stoker and his satirical account of crimes against the vampire race. Will he survive, or will his broken versifying see him slaughtered?
- February 2024
- February 2024
Smörgåsbord is the Corpus Playroom's own eclectic bi-annual showcase of new student-written theatre.
For over a decade, this evening has been a rite of passage for emerging student playwrights in Cambridge, and it’s the event at the heart of the Corpus Playroom’s calendar.
We particularly seek to give a spotlight to those who haven’t previously had their work audienced, and to anyone who feels that they have an underrepresented narrative or cultural lineage to bring to the fore.
Come and sample a platter of the most exciting new theater in town!
- February 2024
'Place like this - you know this - place like this gets in your blood. Once it's in your blood, you can't get it out.'
One night under Cardiff skies, four lost souls go searching for answers. After dark, when the city is quiet, their paths weave and collide. Their stories may be shocking, their morals may be ambiguous, but they all want salvation. When dawn breaks, their lives will go on, however there will be another night to contend with soon enough. Be prepared for a close-up glimpse into a heartbreaking world of choices and consequences in the Welsh capital. Can anyone really break free from their past?
- February 2024
‘You know, he would’ve done it himself if he could. He would’ve walked the whole way here, dug his own bleeding grave and laid down.’
‘But he didn’t. He asked us to do it instead.’
When Matt dies, he leaves behind a wife, a brother, and extensive instructions on how to make him a bog body. To complete this unusual final request Ada and Chris must first fake his funeral, smuggle his body to a remote Scottish island and finally bury him. Unfortunately, life (or more accurately, death) is never that simple and on this road trip Ada and Chris learn more about Matt, each other, themselves, and bog chemistry than either of them could have bargained for.
- February 2024
“I used to have dreams. Of disappearing into the jungle, and never coming back. And everything in the jungle would be upside down. Tigers would be blue, crows could be pink, mushrooms would glow, and nothing would be normal. But I was so happy in that jungle.”
Racked with homesickness in a strange, vast city, Jia Wei finds herself breaking down in the middle of a 24-hour convenience store -- until she is suddenly rescued by the charming Kim, a fellow customer, who shows her an unexpected kindness.
Soon, they begin to meet there most nights, and a romance quickly develops. Kim is enamoured with her - perhaps a little too much - and Jia Wei is persuaded to move into Kim’s grand mansion, nestled in the Malaysian countryside. However, this utopia turns nightmarish when Kim’s overbearing adoration takes a terrifying turn. Isolated and trapped in Kim’s dark house, will Jia Wei find a way out?
- January–February 2024
Imagine spending 19 years with someone you barely get along with over a single, continuous game of chess. What would you do? How far would you go to dissipate the boredom? In my new minimally-staged, mile-a-minute play, two mathematicians who drifted apart in life argue over and risk everything in death amid furious and hilarious wordplay and wit as a third mathematician and mutual acquaintance threatens to break them apart.
