The Leisure Society

Synopsis

A deliciously offensive four-hander comedy by the award-winning Montreal playwright Francois Archambault (translated by Bobby Theodore). A well-heeled, self-obsessed couple, Peter and Mary, invite their fast-living friend over to dump him. But when Mark turns up with his stunning young girlfriend Paula, the dinner party spectacularly nosedives into a drunken swamp of personal revelation and debauchery.

The Leisure Society is a one-act morality play with absolutely no moral compass.

This play marks Agyness Deyn's stage debut as Paula. She is joined by Ed Stoppard (The Glass Menagerie, Wit and currently Upstairs Downstairs on TV),John Schwab and Melanie Gray.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 2 March 2012

Supermodels Twiggy and Jerry Hall became actors with a fair degree of success, and now the signs seem fairly good for their catwalk junior, 29 year-old Agyness Deyn, who makes a poised and promising stage debut as a free-living sex buddy in a rather shocking comedy of middle-class immorality.

Not least among the points of interest about The Leisure Society is that it comes from Quebecois writer Franҫois Archambault - a Montreal compatriot of Michel Tremblay and Robert Lepage – in a smart translation by Bobby Theodore, directed by a Pinter specialist, Harry Burton, and also starring Ed Stoppard, hotfoot from the new Upstairs Downstairs.

There’s a kind of cultural stamp and vintage about the short 90-minute event in the smaller of the Trafalgar Studios (the coffin, I call it) that is not let down by the reality of the show. Stoppard plays a bored, successful 30-something whose marriage to borderline alcoholic Ma...

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Latest User Review

steveatplays - 21 March 2012:

Yes, these are terrible people, who shouldn't have a baby, and spend all their time thinking about sex, and being bad friends, and bad partners, but it's an entertaining evening anyway. Upstairs Downstairs' Ed Stoppard does a creditable American accent, Agyness Deyn makes lasers with her eyes, and John Schwab is the most convincing morally vapid sexually voracious hedonist I've seen in a while, but who IS this Melanie Gray? Where did she come from, and why haven't I heard of her? Her descent into drinking is perfect, her scorn for her husband and life in general searing, her speech about "having everything [she] ever wanted" sardonically scalding, and her comic timing perfect! She nails every laugh without laughing. When she laughed in the encore, I was surprised because she convinced me, that like her lost soul character, Mary, she couldn't laugh. One to watch....

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