An Evening of Two One Act Plays
Still Life by Noel Coward
and
The Rose and Crown by J. B. Priestley
These two plays were first performed by The Riverside Drama Group in 1962 as a private performance. Since 2012-2013 was our Golden Jubilee year, we though it appropriate to revisit these two plays and present them once again, this time to a public audience.
Still Life ….. This Noel Coward play was first performed in 1936 but became world-famous as the film Brief Encounter ten years later. As with much of Coward’s work, it is a sensitive and sophisticated look at a love and passion that was always doomed by the circumstances of the lovers. Two happily married people fall hopelessly in love after a chance meeting, but the fleeting chance to leave everything familiar behind and consummate their feelings for each other never, quite, happens. The values of the 1940s were, of course, rather different to those of today but this bitter-sweet piece still transcends the years and will tug at your heartstrings as much as it ever did.
The Rose and Crown was written by J.B. Priestley in 1946 and broadcast by the BBC as a television play, he adapted it for stage performance in 1947. It is a morality play set in a pub in London where a collection of locals are bemoaning their lot in life until the arrival of a mysterious stranger. Events then take a turn that nobody was expecting until a resolution is found. Intrigued? Come along to find out who the stranger is and what he proposes!
