Event Listing - Theater

Fri Apr 25 - Sat May 3

Thrillpeddlers present

Flaming Sin: London's Grand Guignol

Tel. 415.377.4202
Website

Location	Date and Time
Hypnodrome 575 10th Street San Francisco, CA 94103-4829 map cross street: between Bryant and Division district: SoMa	Fri Apr 25 (8pm) Sat Apr 26 (8pm) Fri May 2 (8pm) Sat May 3 (8pm)

Description

A double-bill from London's Grand Guignol theatre featuring the U.S. Premiere of Noel Coward's long-lost one-act comedy "The Better Half" and Christopher Holland's "The Old Women, or A Crime In A Madhouse."

"The Better Half," scathingly funny and bitter, skewers the sexual mores of the British upper crust. Coward wrote it in 1921, at the age of 22, when he was still several years away from breaking through as the most popular playwright in the English language. "His caustic wit was already fully in evidence," said University of Glamorgan professor Dr. Richard Hand, who discovered the original manuscript (with his colleague, Michael Wilson) deep in the files of the Lord Chamberlain at the British Library.

"Coward wrote it for London's Grand Guignol Company," Hand explained, "which was the British version of France's notorious Theatre du Grand Guignol, which specialized in scandalous comedies and terror plays. It was performed in May 1922, but never again. And it never has been published in any form."