The Best of British Theatre - World Wide

Richmond Productions

Previous Productions

Here are some examples of our previous productions

Postcards from Maupassant is an evening of delight. The well known stories of Guy De Maupassant have been wittily and sparklingly adapted for the stage by Caroline Harding and won the coveted Critics Choice Award at the Edinburgh Festival 2001.

 

The postcards of the title are short plays, vignettes of life in late 19^th-century France; a straying husband returns to his wife, only to find that she has learned some unexpected lessons from his mistress. A stranger provides an ‘intimate’ service for a woman he meets on the train, and they must face the embarrassment of the rest of the journey. Three people are affected by the arrival of spring in different ways. Nurses, tending a dying man, find ways of making the vigil less onerous. Two strangers discover a graveyard meeting is the starting point for a relationship.

These scenes of chance encounters are fleeting, but they tell us much about the condition of the human heart and the labyrinthine workings of the mind. Each of the plays is comic, laced with strong characterisations and thought provoking emotional depth.

 

 

There is an honesty in the acting that matches the directness of Maupassant’s observations about the good, the foolish and the manipulative. The Guardian

NEVILLE’S ISLAND by TIM FIRTH

Four out-of-condition, middle-aged businessmen are sent on a team building exercise in the Lake District in the North of England. Unfortunately they manage to achieve the dubious honour of becoming the first people ever to get shipwrecked on an island in the middle of Lake Derwentwater.

 

Bound in by fog, menaced by wildlife and cut off from the world, this perfunctory middle-class exercise turns into a carnival of recrimination, French cricket…and a sausage!

 

What should have been a bonding process for Gordon, Angus, Roy and Neville turns into a muddy, bloody and very funny fight for survival. Because, when night sets in, strange things start to happen on the island.

 

What takes place on Neville’s Island during that foggy November weekend, none of these middle-management businessmen would ever forget…

 

This brilliantly funny play by Tim Firth won great acclaim when is was first produced and has gone on to become a major television presentation as well as being played to delighted audiences all round the world.

A young couple, Greg and Ginny, are living together in their modest London flat. But Greg is becoming more and more suspicious that he may not be the only man in Ginny’s life: little things like telephone calls that cut off the moment he answers, a drawer full of boxes of chocolates, a pair of slippers that are neither his nor hers. Greg is also suspicious about Ginny’s plan to ‘visit her parents’ and decides to follow her.

In fact his grounds for suspicion are well founded: Ginny is actually going to visit her considerably older lover and break off her relationship with him and retrieve some incriminating letters. When Greg arrives he mistakes the ex-lover and his wife for Ginny’s parents. Further confusion arises when the ex-lover is mislead into thinking that Greg is his wife’s lover and wants to marry her. Ginny’s arrival further confounds an already wildly hilarious situation. Misunderstandings and mistaken identities combine to make this as one of Ayckbourn’s funniest and most brilliant comedies.

 

‘From the start the absolutely hilarious network of misunderstandings and mistaken identities makes Relatively Speaking a roller coaster of laughs – there was hardly a dry eye in the house.’ The Times

RELATIVELY SPEAKING by Alan  Ayckbourn

POSTCARDS FROM MAUPASSANT