by GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
directed by FREYA GRIFFITHS
Our popular series of script-in-hand performances returns this April in a new afternoon slot while we carry out our capital project to rebuild our front of house.
Taking place at 4pm in our auditorium, OT Teatime Plays continues the tradition of our Lunchtime Plays, honouring the origins of the Orange Tree Theatre. In the theatre’s earliest days, a group of actors would gather in a room above the Orange Tree pub to read a play in the round, without a set.
We launch the series with Village Wooing by George Bernard Shaw, an anti-romantic Shavian comedy directed by the OT’s Birkbeck Resident Assistant Director Freya Griffiths. Freya has assisted on recent OT productions including Dance of Death and The Rivals, and we are delighted to showcase her work.
A chance meeting at sea brings together two very different travellers: a shy, cerebral author in search of quiet, and a brisk, practical young woman with little patience for his reserve. When they meet again months later in her village shop, their conversation resumes and quickly becomes a lively contest of wit, stubbornness, and curiosity.
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is one of the world’s greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
OT Teatime Plays are staged readings, performed script-in-hand and without décor. During the capital project, we will operate a drinks trolley service in the auditorium. As with Lunchtime Plays, a free drink is included in the price of your ticket, from a slightly reduced selection of cold drinks including wine, beer, and soft drinks.