LONDON SUITE, produced on Broadway in 1995, is a collection of four short plays set in the same suite of a fashionable old hotel in London. In each playlet Simon sets a different tone, starting with a thriller, moving to a comedy, then to a comedy-drama, and finally a hilarious farce. LONDON SUITE contains Simon’s characteristic witty dialogue,…
Jan de Hartog (1914—2002) was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands. His father was a minister and theology professor. He left home at the age of ten to work as a sailor on fishing boats and steamers. After attending the Amsterdam Naval College, he worked at the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre from 1932 to 1937. During this period he wrote…
This long-running Broadway comedy (also a popular film) is not only about a love affair taking place once a year. It is also a reflection of 25 years of American manners, morals and attitudes mirrored in the changing lives and personalities of its two characters. George picks up Doris in a California inn in 1951,…
This play (as well as the musical CABARET) was adapted from THE BERLIN STORIES of Christopher Isherwood (1904—1986). It looks at life in a Berlin rooming house of 1930 with a photographic eye. Chris is a struggling young writer whose novel, I AM A CAMERA, concerns the events occurring around him in the Berlin of…
DON’T MISUNDERSTAND ME opened in May of 1984 at the Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead. From the very beginning the play has been extremely popular with audiences and critics. After a tour of Sweden in 1985 and the U.K. in 1986, the play has gone on to successful runs in theatres across the U.K. and abroad. This…
I’LL BE BACK BEFORE MIDNIGHT! was named in a recent Toronto Globe & Mail retrospective on Canadian theatre as “probably the most produced Canadian play ever.” The play has grossed over $8 million world wide, and has had countless productions in Canada, the USA and Europe, placing the author among the top playwrights working in…
TWELFTH NIGHT (“Was Ihr wollt
Vicky, who runs a bookshop, is overweight. She suffers, good humouredly enough, the negative remarks of the two characters who share her home next to the shop: James, a Scottish youth who works as an au pair, and Henry, a not-so-young gay man. When a customer—a handsome man of thirty—seems attracted to her, she resolves…
AN INSPECTOR CALLS is usually seen as a social message wrapped in a detective story, or thriller. Penned in 1945 but set in 1912, the author was writing from his personal experience of two world wars and was warning of another one to come unless people changed their behaviour. For him this meant taking moral…
There is a time in everyone’s life when you have to get serious, quit acting like a child and start acting like a grown-up. This would seem to be the message, if there is one, in Neil Simon’s autobiographical play COME BLOW YOUR HORN. Known later in Germany under three different titles (Leg doch endlich…