Playground 4: the waiting room

Playground 4 – The Waiting Room played in September 2022 at at Mike’s Badhuistheater. With each Playground we pick a theme and present 3-5 short plays based on that theme, including work from emerging playwrights, as well as established greats.

This evening of short plays was about the conversations that take place as people wait for important decisions that could change their lives.

The plays:

Womberang

by Sue Townsend (author of the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾)
The waiting room of a gynecology clinic. Patients wait nervously. Enter Rita Onions. Her verve and energy, combined with a complete lack of respect for authority, gradually spreads an infectious, joyous anarchy throughout the patients as she demolishes officious hospital staff and generally sorts out the patients personal problems.
Directed by Cathrine Andresen and Yann Belin
This amateur production of “Womberang” was presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals Ltd. on behalf of Samuel French Ltd. http://www.concordtheatricals.co.uk

Jail Bird
by Niall Cleary
Following a night of heavy drinking, an Irish man wakes up in the holding cell of an Amsterdam police station with a (sore) head full of questions. When did he get a lawyer? What happened the night before that landed him here? And just how much trouble is he really in?
Directed by Jess Graham

The Astronaut’s Missing Passport
by Denis Burke
Having safely completed her first mission to space, Sadaf begins her journey home in the altered circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic but loses her passport on the way.
Stuck in bureaucratic limbo at the immigration office of a remote UK airport, she talks about Brexit, privatisation, statues and nationalism, with the officials detaining her as they weigh her story and their doubts about her identity.
Directed by Denis Burke