The Rude Mechanical Theatre Company return to Winchelsea for an open-air performance at St Thomas’s School on Thursday 1 August 2024
The production is called ‘The Dressing Book’ and is aimed at adults although some children will enjoy it. There is advice on suitability on the company’s website. It is both a hilarious comedy – when two ladies turn up to a ball in identical dresses a fracas follows – but equally poetic and tender. It is set in 1795 in Tunbridge Wells but plays games with time and social status and has a twist in the tail.
It follows the ‘social round’ of Maybelline who records which dresses she wears for each event in her ‘dressing book’ – and the men she encounters while wearing them. The play opens a window on the way clothes were – and still are – a means by which men could control the separated public and private worlds of women. Has anything changed? Through a process of ‘magic realism’ the action changes to the 1960’s and Maybelline’s clothes, which had been her prison, now set her free.
Tickets are available now on the company’s website– or ring 01323 501260.
