.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde's brilliant play makes fun of the English upper classes with light-hearted satire and dazzling humour. It is 1890's England and two young gentlemen are being somewhat limited with the truth. To inject some excitement into their lives, Mr Worthing invents a brother, Earnest, as an excuse to leave his dull country life behind him to pursue the object of his desire, the ravishing Gwendolyn. While across town Algernon Montecrieff decides to take the name Earnest, when visiting Worthing's young ward Cecily. The real fun and confusion begins when the two end up together and their deceptions are in danger of being revealed.

PYGMALION by Bernald Shaw 

...was our 2008 mid-year production written by Bernard Shaw and directed by Kate Davis. The Washington Theatre Group would like to thank our audience and hope you all enjoyed the show. 

"Pygmalion" (the name of which comes from Ovid's tale of Pygmalion, a legendary figure of Cyprus who fell in love with a statue he made) was written shortly before World War I and deals with the class system in London at that time, focusing particularly on accent and dialect and its part in that system. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins boasts to fellow expert Colonel Pickering that he can pass off Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle as a society lady by teaching her how to speak correctly. They then bet the expenses of the experiment that he can and can't do it respectively, and the transformation begins. The play later focuses onto Eliza's integration into her new society and the ever-complicated relationship between her and Higgins.

BLUE REMEMBERED HILLS by Dennis Potter

Blue Remembered Hills was our 2007 mid-year production. The Washington Theatre Group would like to thank our audience and hope you all enjoyed the show.

Blue Remembered Hills remains one of Dennis Potter's best-known plays, and is likely the one that is most often still produced on the stage (even though it was originally written for television) about a story of childhood. The characters are young children, but Potter's twist here is that they are not played by young child-actors. Instead it is adult actors that fill the roles, which of course puts quite a different spin on things, even as the adults act in best childish manner.

It is 1943, in the West Country, with war in the air and the world of adults still largely a mystery. The different children have different fears and temperaments. They tease, play, argue, chase a squirrel. It is still a world of considerable innocence, but innocence comes tumbling down in an awful climax. Blue Remembered Hills is a straightforward realistic play, but Potter still packs a powerful punch in it. However, the most striking thing about the play -- the adults assuming the roles of the young children -- is generally lost on the page, and so it is not quite as effective read as it is seen.  

English author Dennis Potter (1935-1994) is best known for his television scripts Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective.

PRESENT & PAST SHOWS

2010 July  - Welcome to the Jungle - written by John Seymour.

2010 January - Peter Pan and the Revenge of Hook (Pantomime) - written and directed by Sarah Tetchner and Nigel Judson.

2009 July  - The Importance of being Earnest (Comedy Drama) - written by Oscar Wilde and directed by Ann-Marie Cook.

2009 January - Snow White and the Magic Mirror (Pantomime) - written and directed by Peter Marshall.

2008 July - Pygmalion (Comedy Drama) - written by Bernald Shaw and directed by Kate Davis.

2008 January - Aladdin and the Magic Lamp (Pantomime) - written and directed by Peter Marshall.

2007 June - Blue Remembered Hills (Drama) - written by Dennis Potter and directed by Kate Davis.

2007 January - Cinderella (Pantomime) - written by Cat Brannagin, directed by Neil Armstrong and Peter Marshall.

.

2006 October - A Night of Horror (Various) - written and directed by various WTG members.