OT Lunchtime Plays – Who’s The Dupe?

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16 January 2026

Running time

1 hour

Rated

12+

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Fri16thJan

1:00pm

OT Lunchtime Plays

As our sparkling run of The Rivals continues, OT Lunchtime Plays return for 2026 with a two-act farce by one of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s celebrated 18^th Century peers, Hannah Cowley.

Elizabeth’s father – a rich, Cockney merchant – is determined to marry her to a man of learning. The man in question is Gradus, a stuffy Oxford academic who knows a lot about obscure Greek and Latin texts and nothing at all about how to woo a woman. But Elizabeth has other ideas. Her preference is for Granger, a poor but dashing captain in the army (who loves Elizabeth… and her fortune). With the aid of her cousin and Granger’s friend, can Elizabeth see to it that Granger not Gradus wins her hand? In this riotous farce, the scholar must pass as a man of fashion, and the man of fashion as a scholar.

Tickets are £15. and include a glass of wine or soft drink.

Please note, Lunchtime Plays at the OT are staged readings, with script in hand, without décor.

Alice Wordsworth is a freelance theatre and film director. Most recently Alice directed The Next Morning by James Graham, a short film for the National Theatre and she is currently Associate Director on All My Sons.

Other Directing credits include: Spring Awakening (LAMDA); For Susie, With Love (Short Film); Anansi The Spider (Unicorn); An Intervention (Riverside Studios); Duizend Schepen, We’re All Mad Here, and Love Stories (Amsterdam on Stage).

As Associate Director: The Seagull (Barbican); Oedipus (Wyndham’s); F*ghag (Assembly, Edinburgh Fringe); Opening Night (Gielgud); Macbeth (UK Tour/ Washington DC); and An Hour & A Half Late (Theatre Royal Bath).

Assistant Director: A Little Life (Harold Pinter & Savoy); Gulliver’s Travels, Maggot Moon, The Canterville Ghost, The Bee in Me (Unicorn) and Love on the Links (Salisbury Playhouse).

Hannah Cowley (1743-1809) was born in Tiverton, Devon. Dismayed by the quality of the plays she saw in London, Cowley was determined to do better. Her first play, a comedy called The Runaway, did just that, proving to be a box-office hit at Drury Lane Theatre in 1776. Further success was to follow, and she became one of the most popular and brilliant playwrights of the late eighteenth century, with her plays performed not only in England and Ireland but in Austria and Germany. In all, she wrote two tragedies and six comedies, including The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), which is often regarded as her masterpiece. Who’s the Dupe was first performed at Drury lane in 1779, just four years after Sheridan’s The Rivals.

David Francis Taylor is Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of St. Hugh’s College. He specialises in Restoration and 18th-century theatre and is a founding member of the R/18 Collective, an international group scholars who are working with theatre companies to revive undeservedly forgotten plays of the period.