16, Church Road, Northenden, Manchester M22 4NN
www.northendenplayers.co.uk
Registered Charity No: 1175846
Plays for the
2019-2020 season
Performance Starting Times:
Sunday’s 7:00pm all other nights at 7:30pm
PLEASE NOTE:
All productions now have an extra night’s performance on a Monday evening.
Dec 8th - 14th
Sept 1st - 7th
Set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. It tells the story of Jo, a 17-year-old working class girl, & her mother, Helen, who is presented as crude and sexually indiscriminate. Helen leaves Jo alone in their new flat after she begins a relationship with Peter, a rich lover who is younger than she. At the same time Jo begins a romantic relationship with Jimmy, a black sailor. He proposes marriage but then goes to sea, leaving Jo pregnant and alone. She finds lodgings with a homosexual acquaintance, Geoffrey, who assumes the role of surrogate father. Helen returns after leaving her lover and the future of Jo's new home is put into question.
Season's Greetings is a 1980 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. It is a black, though often farcical, comedy about four days in the life of a dysfunctional family, starting on Christmas Eve and set in an average English suburban house.
Oct 20th - 26th
Feb 9th - 15th
Set in Cornwall in the mid-1930s, the play tells of two ageing spinster sisters, Ursula and Janet Widdington. Their lives are turned upside down when they discover a young man washed ashore on the beach, close to death. They nurse him back to health and discover he is a talented Polish violinist, on his way to seek a career in the USA. Despite her sister’s concerns, Ursula falls in love with Andrea. It leads to a journey of discovery for her and a poignant ending.
Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Noël Coward. The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles's marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.
Mar 29th - Apr 4th
Arthur Miller’s play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian-American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love of, and almost obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice's orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice's cousin Rodolpho.
May 17th - 23rd
It is the summer of 1953, George & Charlotte Hay, formerly a couple of Broadway stars, take their run-down touring company to Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo they have the intention of running “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Private Lives” in repertory, all the while grumbling about missed Hollywood opportunities. On-stage harmony is compromised when George performs an off-stage infidelity, impregnating the company’s ingenue. When Charlotte learns of this, she prepares to run away with the family lawyer, sending lightweight George on a grief-stricken drinking binge. It turns out that Frank Capra is headed to town on a talent scouting mission looking to hire the couple for his swashbuckling epic. As a result, the Hay family including scornful, deaf mother in law Ethel, determinedly practical daughter Rosalind, and dashing actor Paul, Rosalind’s ex-boyfriend must work overtime to get sloppy drunk George into his Cyrano hat and nose…. or is it his Elyot Chase smoking jacket? With the entrance of Rosalind’s fiance, anxious TV weatherman Howard one man with two mistaken identities and Richard Maynard, the wealthy lawyer hoping to lure Charlotte away to his mansion the confusion only intensifies. With a plethora of pratfalls, slamming doors aplenty, and backstage shenanigans.