The Ovalhouse Autumn Season - Oct to Nov 2013

The Ovalhouse Theatre in south London has announced its autumn season Oct to Nov 2013, which includes:

in Theatre Downstairs...

The Fu Manchu Complex by Daniel York Loh, from 1 to 19 Oct 2013. Directed by Justin Audibert, produced Ovalhouse and Moongate Productions in association with Mark Cartwright. Battling through clouds of opium, spiffing chaps Dr Petrie and Inspector Nayland Smith must do anything to stop the dastardly plans of evil criminal mastermind Dr Fu Manchu; but will their colonial angst allow them to do away with the villainous evil genius and save merry old England? And as their blundering leads them to ever more absurd conclusions, we ask, who is the real Fu Manchu?

Moon Project by Rachel Blackman, from 29 Oct to 16 Nov 2013. Produced by Ovalhouse and Stillpoint Theatre. A story inspired by the solar system and space travel, about two parallel lives. Shahab yearns for home but cannot return; Leila yearns for transcendence but cannot escape... until one day when their lives collide. How do we recover, when, in a single moment, everything we thought we knew is blown into a billion pieces?

The Lady's Not For Walking Like An Egyptian written & performed by Rachel Mars and nat tarrab, from 19 to 23 2013. What do you get if you cross all of the words of Margaret Thatcher's public speeches with all of the words of every top ten hit by a female artist from the 80s, and look at them through the filter of American Tan tights?

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Stan's Cafe, from 26 to 30 Nov 2013. A guided tour through an extraordinary work of English literature: It's 1638, and in his study, librarian and vicar Robert Burton is rehearsing a stage adaptation of his best selling self-help manual The Anatomy of Melancholy. It's difficult—the book is one and a half thousand pages long. Full of cutting edge science: maids vomiting pebbles, priests defecating in ditches, and enormous expansive long lists of every food, herb, location, activity or occupation that can bring on or cure melancholy in any one of its many forms. The whole enterprise is starting to get him down.

in Theatre Upstairs...

The Act by Thomas Hescott, from 8 to 26 Oct 2013. If you want to get ahead in the civil service it helps to have friends in low places: By day he was a respectable civil servant, but by night he could be found down The Dilly with the inverts and low lifes of the Soho underbelly. It's the final days for an underground community catapulted into the mainstream, and all because the Church of England believed in the decriminalisation of homosexuality.