Roy Williams: Plays 4

Paul Godfrey is “so good, so nervy and alert with imagination and intelligence” (Sunday Times). Includes the plays:

Inventing a New Colour

“Godfrey’s appealing first play is, with its ominous signs of disjunction, like a surrealist painting”(Guardian)

Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens

“A fictional-biographical account of Benjamin Britten…lyrical, poetic prose, sinuous, swift, eloquent and dramatic” (Sunday Times)

A Bucket of Eels

“Danger gives Paul Godfrey’s wonderful play its drama. Six young people enter a Freudian forest of their own imaginings” (Financial Times)

The Blue Ball

“An enquiry into the magic of space exploration…a rather interesting, idiosyncratic and well written play” (Observer) is an imaginative investigation of the experience of Space researched by the playwright among the astronauts themselves. This ambitious play questions the politics of a culture in which the wondrous is rendered mundane and what seems commonplace is rendered absurd. The Blue Ball was commissioned by the Royal National Theatre and received its premiere at the Cottesloe Theatre in 1995.

Three plays, ‘all written for live theatre – with the emphasis on live’, and all first performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough: The Revengers’ Comedies (1989); Things We Do for Love (1997); and House & Garden (1999).

The Revengers’ Comedies
A hugely entertaining pitch that recalls the old movies to which it frequently pays homage – Strangers on a Train, Rebecca, Kind Hearts and Coronets – and expands after intermission to reveal an immensely disturbing vision of contemporary middle-class England poisoned by the rise of economic ruthlessness and the collapse of ethics. New York Times

Things We Do for Love
Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award
One of his best, his most shockingly and uproariously funny: a cruel and hilarious masterpiece of tragic comedy and comic tragedy. Sunday Times

House & Garden
The triumph of his ingenuity lies in the fact that you have to see both plays . . . A second time round, in whichever order you take them, characters will deepen, while those you know become the background. It is a superb Ayckbourn joke that a comedy about non-communication should depend on the sharpest communication skills. Sunday Times