Malvern Theatre Players THE ANNIVERSARY  by Bill Macilwraith Every year since her husband died, Mum has held an anniversary party (despite the absence of her husband) which she has always insisted all the family must attend. Her three grown-up sons are still dominated by their scalpel-tongued, deviously possessive mother, both in their daily business and personal lives, a woman who usually manages to make them do whatever she wants, regardless of their own family needs. This year they gather as…

  Malvern Theatre Players A Bunch of Amateurs  by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman Presented by arrangement with Samuel French Ltd  Keen to boost his flagging career, fading Hollywood action hero Jefferson Steele arrives in England to play King Lear in Stratford – only to find that this is not the birthplace of the Bard, but a sleepy Suffolk village. And instead of Kenneth Branagh and Dame Judi Dench, the cast are a bunch of amateurs trying to save their…

  When Shakespeare died, he famously left his wife Anne only one thing, the second best bed. This superb one-woman play, full of both humour and pathos, has received great critical acclaim since its premier at the Swan Theatre Worcester in 2012. Liz Grand stars as Anne Hathaway on the night of Shakespeare’s funeral. The wake has finished, the mourners have all gone home, leaving Anne to remember her life with the most talented playwright the world has ever seen.…

  Meet Joseph, just about the worst carpenter in the area. He first got to know his wife when she returned to complain about a table she had bought from him. It didn’t stop him asking her out and they eventually got married. A pretty unremarkable marriage until Mary announces that she is pregnant and that Joseph is not the father. When the boy grows up, he turns out to have a remarkable talent with wood, lending further weight to…

  Agatha Christie was one of the greatest thriller writers of all time and certainly the most prolific. In 1926, she was at the centre of a mystery as perplexing as any of her fiction, a series of events which sparked one of the biggest and most extensive police hunts in history. Her crashed car was discovered in Surrey and the famous author was missing, presumed dead by many, for eleven days. However, she was eventually found at a luxury…