Person: Connor Nestor

The Sweet Science of Bruising

Victorian London, 1869. The shadowy world of female boxing provides the opportunity for four very different women to break away from the lives that have been ordained for them by society.

Polly Stokes is a fighter, has been ever since she was abandoned on a doorstep as a babe. Irish-born Mattie Blackwell lives on the streets, her life a constant battle to survive. Violet Hunter wants to be a doctor but no man will let her, and Anna Lamb seems to have it all, a husband, children, a house, servants… but in truth, she has nothing.

Held in by corsets, held back by men, the violent release they find in the boxing ring brings them a form of freedom they’ve never known, but at the final bell, there can only be one Lady Boxing Champion of the World.

An epic tale of passion, power, politics and pugilism from the pen of Joy Wilkinson and performed with verve by TWC.

Burnley-born Joy Wilkinson is an accomplished and prize-winning author who has written several plays (Now is the Time, Fair and Britain’s Best Recruiting Sergeant among others), plus numerous TV and film scripts covering a range from sci-fi/fantasy such as Doctor Who and Lockwood & Co. through to thrilling dramas Suspect and The Pact, via Holby City, Casualty and Land Girls.

Much Ado About Nothing (2015)

The path of true love proves to be anything but smooth for not one but two sets of star-crossed lovers in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, one of Shakespeare’s most romantic, yet comedic tales. For young Claudio and his lady Hero, their happiness is threatened by the Machiavellian scheming of the plain-dealing villain, Don John. For self-professed lifelong batchelor Benedict and the independently minded and sharp-tongued Beatrice, the biggest obstacles are…themselves!

By turns funny, touching, heart-breaking and hilarious, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is the perfect way to spend an English Summer evening.

Leonato, a kindly, respectable nobleman, lives in the Italian town of Messina. He shares his villa with his lovely young daughter, Hero, his clever but cynical niece, Beatrice, and his elderly brother, Antonio. As the play begins, Leonato prepares to welcome his good friend, Don Pedro, home from war. Don Pedro, a prince, is accompanied by two friends and fellow soldiers: Claudio, a well-respected young nobleman, and Benedick, a joker who delights in teasing his colleagues. With them too comes Don John, Don Pedro’s illegitimate brother, a sullen, spiteful individual who resents others’ happiness.

After the soldiers arrive, Claudio swiftly falls in love with Hero, while Benedick and Beatrice resume the war of words that they have carried on with each other for years. Claudio and Hero pledge their love to one another and decide to be married. But to pass the days before the wedding, the lovers and their friends decide to trick Beatrice and Benedick, who are obviously meant for each other, into falling in love.

However,  Don John intends to spoil everything. He plots with his followers Borachio and Conrade to ruin Hero’s reputation. And taken in by the treacherous scheme, an enraged Claudio humiliates Hero at the wedding by accusing her of lechery and abandoning her at the altar. Horrified, Hero’s family pretend that she has died of shock and grief and hide her away. Fortunately, a passing watch patrol overhear Borachio drunkenly bragging about his misdeeds to Conrade. Dogberry and Verges, the bumbling heads of the local watch, eventually arrest them and drag them in front of the local magistrate, Leonato. The truth of Don John’s plot is thus revealed, and Claudio and Don Pedro, who believe Hero is dead, are grief stricken.

Leonato tells Claudio that, as a penance for his misjudgement, he must marry his brother  Antonio’s daughter — a girl who, he says, looks much like the dead Hero. Claudio goes to church with the others, solemnly prepared to do his duty and marry the mysterious, masked woman he finds there. But when the masked woman reveals herself to be Hero, Claudio is overwhelmed with joy and all is forgiven.

Benedick then asks Beatrice if she will marry him, and after some verbal sparring,  she agrees. The joyful lovers then celebrate with a double wedding as Don John, who had attempted to escape, is dragged back to face his half-brother’s justice.

Machinal

Regularly appearing on ‘The Best Plays of All Time’ lists, ‘Machinal’ is a vivid, unflinching portrayal of the life of a young, working-class woman in 1920’s America. Across nine tense episodes, we play witness to the key moments of her life – from marriage and motherhood, to adultery, murder, and its consequences. We see how women had to navigate a world run by men for men, in an increasingly mechanistic society demanding conformity.
Placing its young heroine at its centre, ‘Machinal’ traces her fight against the trap of a life predestined, as she hurtles toward her desperate and destructive attempt to break free.
It’s a brave, absorbing play that will stay with you long afterwards; unafraid to challenge its audience and to advance ideas that would have been seen as deeply controversial at the time, yet remain all too relevant today.

Journalist and playwright, Sophie Treadwell (1885 – 1970), placed women and marginalised voices front and centre of her stories. Today ‘Machinal’ (1928) is regarded as a masterpiece – an outstanding example of American Expressionist theatre. But in her day, Treadwell never achieved commercial success, and for much of the Twentieth Century her plays were rarely produced. Even today, her name is little known outside drama schools and histories of theatre. Slowly and rightly though, her ground-breaking early modern plays are now being rediscovered, performed and celebrated anew.

With a specially composed industrial soundscape and an accent on physical theatre this production has taken Theatre Workshop Coulsdon to places it’s not been before. Abrasive, uncomfortable, in places shocking, this is not a quiet night’s entertainment.

Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos

“Good evening. This is the BBC Light Programme broadcasting from London. It’s 6.45 and time for the next thrilling episode of ‘Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos’!”

Yes, Barton is back, and in his toughest assignment yet!

London. 1949. Wartime rationing remains in force, and only marmalade – that nutritious, morale-boosting foodstuff – continues to fortify our island nation’s grit, spunk, vim and pluck after six long years facing down the Nazi peril.
But now there’s a fiendish foreign conspiracy afoot to kidnap Tiggy Zesty-Peel, heiress to the Zesty-Peel preserves empire, and only Dick Barton can stop it. But who has evil designs on the Marmalade Millionairess? And just what is their nefarious purpose?

Meanwhile, Snowy White and Jock Anderson, Barton’s salt-of-the-earth working class assistants, are each in a jam of their own. Snowy’s been injected with bonobo serum during a brush with a batty Bulgarian ballerina, and has gone more than a little ape. And Jock has fallen for the charms of ex-Nazi filmmaker and flaxen femme fatale, Leni Fuchs.
Throw in the homegrown villainy of the Crayfish Twins (the East End’s favourite lovable cockney mass murderers) and mysterious Italian yoga swami, Contessa Bianca Di Scalzo, and the plot is thicker than a jar of rough-cut.
Can Barton unravel the mystery and save Britain’s marmalade? Or will our favourite spread succumb to the spread of evil? To find out, tune in to the next thrilling instalment of ‘Dick Barton and the Carnival of Chaos’!

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon’s third outing for Dick Barton, Boy’s Own adventurer, all-English hero and teatime wireless star, is another ripping comedy adventure, full of improbable characters, glorious gags, and a cheeky sprinkling of spiffing song and dance numbers. Pip pip!

My Fair Lady

Lerner and Loewe’s celebrated stage musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ includes some of the best known and best loved show tunes ever written. From ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverley’ to ‘I’m Getting Married in the Morning’, ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ and ‘With A Little Bit Of Luck’.

It’s the story of a cockney flower girl’s transformation into the pride of London society – and its unforeseen consequences. In many places it’s very funny; in others, very poignant. When overbearing Professor Higgins stumbles on Eliza Doolittle outside Covent Garden Opera House, he recognises that her hideous vowels and lost consonants are all that separates her from the upper classes. Higgins casually makes a wager that within weeks he can pass Eliza off in polite society as a Duchess. But little does he know that beneath the dirty face and shabby clothes, young Eliza is stuffed full of human feeling. Too eloquent for a flower girl, yet lacking the breeding of the ruling classes, what on earth is to become of Eliza when the bet is over and the game has reached an end?

‘My Fair Lady’ was Lerner and Loewe’s musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’, a much darker tale than the highly successful Broadway, West End and Hollywood show tells.

The character of ‘Pygmalion’ comes from Greek mythology, where he was sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had created, a statue that then comes to life. Bernard Shaw took that tale and twisted it, the sculptor becoming Henry Higgins, and the thing he creates, Eliza Doolittle. His play debuted in 1913 in Vienna, before going on to London and New York. Critics were generally favourable, though the ending created a certain level of controversy. A standard love story this wasn’t, and the ending was no more conventional. A film version was made in 1938, starring Leslie Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza, and Shaw, initially distrustful, agreed to it being made only if he had a certain amount of creative control. This resulted in Shaw writing a whole new ballroom scene, the creation of a new character ‘Zoltan Karpathy’, and a new ending. He and his fellow screenwriters were awarded an Oscar for the screenplay, for which Shaw was characteristically dismissive, but it would be this screenplay that would be used as the basis for the musical.

The director of the movie, Gabriel Pascal, had spoken with Shaw about making it into a musical, but the author had refused. However, when Shaw died in 1950, that barrier was no longer an issue. Pascal approached lyricist Alan Jay Lerner to write the musical, with his partner, composer Frederick Loewe. At first, they couldn’t make it work but eventually they found a way, though not before Pascal had died. They called it ‘My Fair Lady’ after a provisional title to Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’, and it referred to the Cockney pronunciation of ‘Mayfair Lady’, helping to show Eliza’s transformation from working-class girl to upper-class woman. The part of ‘Higgins’ was initially offered to Noel Coward, who turned it down but suggested they approach Rex Harrison. ‘Eliza’ was offered to Broadway veteran Mary Martin who also turned it down, and they went instead for newcomer Julie Andrews. It opened on Broadway in March 1956 and was a massive success, going on to become, at the time, the biggest grossing Broadway show ever.

The 1964 movie was a similar success, winning eight Oscars including those for Best Picture and Best Actor (Rex Harrison). Interestingly, the Best Actress Oscar that year went to Julie Andrews for her portrayal of Mary Poppins, having been rejected for reprising the part of Eliza as not being famous enough by the studio. It went, famously, to Audrey Hepburn, whose singing voice was overdubbed by Marni Wood.

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon’s presentation of this fabulous show was directed by veteran actor/director Richard Lloyd with musical director and pianist Mark Taylor, and features Dan Carr as Professor Henry Higgins, Indianna Scorziello as flower-seller Eliza Doolittle, Paul Ford as her ne’er-do-well father Alfred, and Mike Brown as the bluff and amiable Col. Pickering.

Animal Farm (2025)

All is not well on Manor Farm. The animals are neglected and abused by their drunken owner, and anger and a sense of injustice are growing. They dare to dream of taking their destinies into their own hooves, paws and claws. When man is gone, fairness and equality for all animals shall be the rule! Won’t it?

TWC’s Summer 2025 open air production is a new, fast-paced, occasionally frightening and sometimes bleakly comic adaptation of one of the most celebrated novels of the Twentieth Century – George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’.

An army of downtrodden farm animals rises up to overthrow their human oppressors. But their dream of a society where all animals are equal soon collides with the seductive allure of privilege and the corrupting nature of political power. Orwell’s famous fable – a brilliant satire on the Russian revolution and the rise of Stalin – is a gripping tale of rebellion, heroism and ultimate betrayal. The writing is on the wall – literally:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

Grimm Tales (2022)

Dare you go down to the woods today?

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon has adapted ten of the most famous tales from the Brothers Grimm into a single play. By turns magical, terrifying comic and profound, our ‘Grimm Tales’ is a festive theatrical treat for all the family (well, almost), delving as deep as the dwarves into a rich dark seam of lost European folklore.

The tales we’ve included, from ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to ‘Little Red Cap’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, are stripped back to their origins, freed from layers of Victorian prudery and Disney schmaltz, revealing the simple, undiluted truths of these ancient stories. Often funny, sometimes brutal, occasionally touching – they’re familiar yet strange, like something you’ve always known, but are only now seeing them for the first time.

Some of them include some old-fashioned fairy tale revenge, mayhem and a modest amount of gore. In other words, just the kind of things that generations of kids have grown up loving! That said, it’s probably not really suitable for toddlers and the very young. Or those of a particularly nervous disposition.

So join us on a journey to the dark heart of the forest. It all starts with ‘Once upon a time…’

About the Brothers Grimm

The root of all theatre is storytelling. Our performance of ‘Grimm Tales’ is based on some of the best-known stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – those avid collectors of folk tales from across the German-speaking lands of central Europe.

The brothers grew up in the late Eighteenth Century – the flowering of the period of European Romanticism.  The German romantics sought Der Volkseele or ‘folk-psyche’, and returned to the folksongs, ballads, and folk tales of earlier centuries to find it. The simplicity and truth of these folk traditions, despised by the highbrow thinkers of the Enlightenment, suddenly acquired a new value. They pointed to a rich, oral, pan-Germanic cultural legacy.

This quest for a distinctive German identity was given huge impetus in the early Nineteenth Century, when the patchwork of German states, great and small, had been laid waste by Napoleon, and all things German had been crushed under the ascendancy of all things French. For the Grimms, collecting old stories from across the German-speaking lands, became a mission to reinvent a distinctive German culture. Der Volkseele would reinvigorate and bind together the disparate peoples and states of the German nation – culturally, if not politically. In this, the work of the Brothers Grimm foreshadowed German unification, which followed in 1870.

The brothers travelled all over Europe to collect their tales, from the Baltics to Bohemia, Switzerland to Schleswig-Holstein, hoovering up every scrap and morsel of part-remembered fable, coaxed from nobleman and peasant alike. They transcribed these contributions as faithfully as possible, binding in authentic bits of nonsense, dialect words, old sayings, arcane rhymes and doggerel, just as they had been told to them.

In their devoted search for origins, the brothers invented the modern science of folklorism. By the 1850s they’d published seven editions of their two volumes of collected tales. By the end of the Nineteenth century, their 200 or so tales had been translated so widely that they were renowned around the world. Today, they remain the most popular and famous collection of folk stories in the Western world.

 

Wendy and Peter Pan

‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning!’

This Christmas, we’re delighted to present the perfect festive treat for all the family – the classic English childhood myth of love, loss, redemption – and pirates.

And Peter Pan, who never grows old. What’s not to like?

Winter, 1911. Snow is falling across London. Wendy Darling and her brothers sleep peacefully in their bedroom as their parents bicker downstairs. In a sudden flurry of snow their window blows open, and Peter Pan tumbles into their lives – followed by a fractious fairy called Tink. With the help of a little fairy dust, Wendy agrees to fly with Peter to Neverland, seeking an awfully big adventure and the key to her parents’ forgotten happiness – the child they once lost. Once there, Wendy will give the Lost Boys a run for their money, defeat the diabolical pirate Captain James Hook, and ultimately learn what it really means to grow up.

J.M.Barrie’s stage play, Peter Pan, delighted audiences when it premiered in 1904. His novel based on the play, Wendy and Peter, published in 1911, was a huge success. Commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ella Hickson’s Wendy and Peter Pan premiered in December 2013, and it’s a sparkling new adaptation that puts Wendy centre stage. In a feisty take on Barrie’s much-loved tale, it never loses the charm of the original, nor any of its iconic set pieces.
It’s bittersweet, funny in places, touching in others, and brimming with action and adventure. Complete with musical accompaniment by our live band, plus our famous Christmas refreshments. It might be cold outside, but the mince pies and mulled wine will be piping hot!

Sherlock Holmes and the Vampyres of London

London 1887. When the mortal remains of a young aristocrat vanish in the dead of night from Brompton Necropolis, Sherlock Holmes is no sooner asked to investigate than a second mystery presents itself – a beautiful young heiress afflicted by unaccountable night terrors; her vitality slipping away.

As these two strange cases resolve themselves into one, Holmes and his steadfast companion, Dr. John Watson, are plunged into a hidden London of grave-robbing grotesques, murderous Szgany gypsies, and demonic possession that obscures a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow the Crown itself.

Theatre Workshop Coulsdon’s thrilling homage to late Victorian gothic pits two of fiction’s most enduring characters against each other. But in the fog-shrouded metropolis where nothing is what it seems, which towering colossus of literary legend will triumph in this savage, epochal battle of wits?

From the author:

Indulging an occasional impulse to put something dark on stage, when ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Vampyres of London’ slid into my head, I thought I’d hit upon an original idea. Ah well. Ten minutes on Google laid bare an entire sub-culture of Holmes vs. Dracula novels, comics and essays. I guess bringing together the two pre-eminent creations of late Victorian fiction was a bit of a no-brainer. The Yin and Yang of the fin-de-siècle imagination – an epic face-off for the ages…

In the red, white and blue corner: Sherlock Holmes – arch-rationalist, buttoned-up, attractively flawed apotheosis of British pluck, doggedness, and all-round brilliance. Set against him, that epitome of lubricious, unchecked carnal desires: Dracula – the screaming antithesis of idealized Victorian manhood. Evil, hypersexualized, and downright foreign. It’s the ultimate Victorian superhero against the ultimate Victorian bogeyman. I mean, why wouldn’t you?

Holmes first appeared in 1887; Dracula 10 years later in 1897. Both characters achieved almost immediate superstar status – a dazzling supernova of global fame which has shown no sign of fading since. They are twin titans of popular culture, endlessly reimagined in movies, television, books, games and comics.

Both Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker achieved immortality of sorts thanks to their creations: a Scotsman and an Irishman giving life to two of the most famous, enduring, and built-upon characters in English fiction.

I have built upon them shamelessly in turn. It was fun bringing them together.

 

The Wind In The Willows

Since 1908, this classic tale of inquisitive Mole, stolid Ratty, gruff Badger and ‘ever in trouble’ Toad has delighted children of all ages, and most adults too! This stage adaptation by Theatre Workshop Coulsdon follows their adventures from the river bank to the Wild Wood, via the open road to the deepest dungeon, with a thrilling climax at stately Toad Hall. It’s a path strewn with boats, trains, caravans and stolen cars, as our animal heroes overcome adversity and their own natures to emerge victorious. By turns charming and funny, this is a splendid way to while away a English summer’s evening.