A variety of plays lined up for the new Reading Rep season
The première of a farcical variation on staging a traditional Nativity play starts Reading Rep's 2013-14 season, appropriately enough on 22 December. The Nativity Play Goes Wrong opens on 22 December and runs until 4 January in the studio theatre of Reading College's arts complex.
It's written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Spencer – the team responsible for The Play That Goes Wrong on this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Suffice it to say that the mishaps are caused by the well-meaning but somewhat efficient Script Over Scripture Society – SOS for short. Nicholas Thompson, of the Old Red Lion Theatre, directs in a co-production with Mischief Theatre.
Specially commissioned new translations of two plays by the Polish dramatist Slawomir Mrozek follow between 4 and 12 April. Mrozek's use of satire pushes absurd premises to logical but grotesque conclusions. Both Striptease and Out At Sea date from the early 1960s, before he left his native country, and will be directed by Andrea Ferren. Ferren was formerly director-in-residence at the National Theatre Studio.
Reading Rep's own artistic director Paul Stacey stages the third play of the season from 21 July to 9 August. This is David Auburn's Proof, perhaps best-known through its film adaptation, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow as the troubled heroine Catherine. The original New York production in 2000 won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best New Play.
