by Neil Simon

16 - 25 September 2010

This is one of Neil Simon’s earlier works – and still one of his funniest. In a cascade of witty quips and snappy ripostes, there is a laugh in nearly every line. The story centres on the Bratters, a pair of newlywed New Yorkers who move into an apartment six floors up – an agonising climb for everyone but young wife Corrie who is thrilled with her first home. Husband Paul, a rather serious rising lawyer, is not so amused. Neither is Corrie’s mother, a widow with a bad back and a nervous disposition, who is even more nervous when she meets the Bratters’ eccentric European neighbour, Velasco. After a night out with him, the Bratters have their first stand-up row and Corrie accuses Paul of being a stuffed shirt who would never do anything so crazy as to walk barefoot in the park. Meanwhile, her mother has to find out how she lost all her clothes when she passed out in Velasco’s apartment and Paul decides to walk on the wild side to prove his love for Corrie. Naturally, it all ends happily. But you’ll still be laughing on the way out of the theatre.

The Miller Centre Box Office reopens on 31 August

by Frank Harvey

21 - 30 October 2010

This sad romantic play is an adaptation of a short story by Thomas Hardy. It is set in Hardy country, Dorset, in the home of a wealthy brewer, Arthur Harnham, and his unhappy younger wife Edith. The arrival of a fair with a new-fangled steam carousel is the cause of much excitement among the young maids in the house, one of whom, Anna, meets a young man from London. When she receives a letter from him, she confesses to Edith that she cannot read, nor write. The kindly Edith agrees to act as Anna’s shadow by writing to the young man, a barrister named Charles Bradford. Soon, Edith and Charles are exchanging love letters – he still believing hers come from Anna. Anna is found to be pregnant and Charles comes to marry her. On that day, he discovers he has been deceived and is bound, not to the educated woman to whom he has been writing, but to a pretty, illiterate peasant. The play ends on a beautifully sad note. Take your handkerchiefs.

by Ben Brown

25 November - 4 December 2010

Philip Larkin was the author and poet who famously turned down the offer to  become the Poet Laureate and who was also renowned for his assertion that sexual intercourse began in 1963. Larkin was a reclusive man who spent the last of his 63 years of life in the comparative backwater of Hull University, despite being hailed as one of the finest writers of the 20th century and the nation’s favourite poet. Much of his output shed a somewhat ascerbic view of modern society but his personal life was once described as hair-raising but hilarious. Ben Brown’s play looks at Larkin’s life through his relationships with three women – the glamourous Monica Jones, the gentle Maeve Brennan and his long time secretary and confidante, Betty Mackereth – across three decades, a period when Larkin was keeping these three women on the go without marrying any one of them. The result is an amusing insight into the unorthodox, jazz-loving, sexually charged poet who called himself “the Don Juan of Hull”. This year is the 25th anniversary of Larkin’s death and his memory will be celebrated at literary festivals across the world even as our production opens.