Play Reading
Convenor: Philip Cheung
Day: Variable
Frequency: Approximately once a month
Venue: At members’ homes
About our Group
We are a group of about ten who read plays for fun in each others’ homes on a date convenient to the host and a majority of members. Previous experience of play reading is not required and hosting is entirely voluntary. Our selection of plays ranges from the ancient Greeks to recent West End productions, by playwrights based in Britain, Europe and the United States. We have attempted Shakespeare on at least three occasions. Over a cup of tea during the ‘interval’, we have a good chat about the play and other matters.
Recent Activities:
We started the new year 2024 with lunch at the Rose and Crown in Mayfield, each one taking a a piece of writing to read to the others. Some brought writings that soothed or inspired them to meet the challenges of daily life. Two brought poems penned by themselves. One brought three parodies of Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day …”) with a robot as the object of adulation. One was written by a professor of robotics and the others two by the now famous/infamous AI program ChatGPT.
April de Angelis is a living playwright that we have not come across before. We read her ‘A Warwickshire Testimony’ (1999) in February. The material of the play is drawn from the reminiscences of the inhabitants of a village in the Midlands, accumulated in a study of the changes that overtook them during the twentieth century. The play concerns the loves, traumas and disputes of a family who occupied the village Post Office. The story was not one of idyllic rural life, but of a stifling closeness that prompted one of the characters to escape from it all to the big city.
In March, we read Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”, a clever amalgamation of two one-act plays into one. The two plays, spaced eighteen months apart, have two different leading couples, who share the same set of a Bournemouth hotel, with its retired, permanent residents, and manageress as supporting cast. These were well-constructed plays with their intrigues leading to climactic endings.
Alan Ayckbourn’s “House and Garden” will be our play for April. It is yet another two-plays-in-one, with the difference that the plays run simultaneously on the same (partitioned) stage, with the same characters moving between them. Only Ayckbourn, with his gift for hilarious invention, would attempt such a potentially chaotic setup. It will be a challenge for us to picture the scene in our minds as we sit in our chairs and read from a book!
If any of the above appeals to you, and you would like to join us, send an email to Philip using the Blue Bird shown on this page. You will then be put on our mailing list and receive notifications of the date and venue of our monthly readings.