Showing results by narrator "Carolyn Seymour" in All Categories

The provincial Bennet family, home to five unmarried daughters, is turned upside down when a wealthy bachelor takes up a house nearby. Mr. Bingley enhances his instant popularity by hosting a ball and taking an interest in the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane. Meanwhile, Mr. Darcy, Bingley’s even wealthier friend, makes himself equally unpopular by his aloof disdain of country manners.

A deadly virus spreads across the world as quickly as the passenger jets that encircle it. Within weeks most of the global population is dead. The human race is thrown back into the dark ages. The few left alive must rely on the most basic skills to survive one day to the next. Abby Grant ventures out into a strange new England, her husband dead, the fate of her son unknown. Jenny Richards flees London. Engineer Greg Preston arrives from abroad.

Suspense mounts when Paulina and her husband offer hospitality to a stranger. Paulina thinks she recognizes, in their guest, the man who tortured her in prison, and she subsequently takes him hostage to find out the truth. A stunningly blunt and compelling play, Death and the Maiden explores brilliantly the issues of torture, power, vulnerability, ethics, and trust. An award-winning play by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, forced into exile in 1973.

When Lynn Barber was 16, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber’s seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels and posh restaurants and trips abroad, expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist.

A galaxy of friends, lovers, relatives and theatre acolytes sparkles around stage star Garry Essendine like bubbles in fine champagne. While Garry struggles to plan his upcoming trip to Africa, his elegant London flat is invaded by a love-struck ingenue, an adulterous producer, and a married seductress - not to mention Garry's estranged wife, Liz, and the memorable Roland Maule, an aspiring playwright who is quite, quite mad.

It begins with just a few people falling ill. Another flu virus that spreads around the globe. And then the reports begin that people are dying.... When most of the world's population is wiped out, a handful of survivors are left to pick up the pieces. Cities become graveyards. Technology becomes largely obsolete. Mankind must start again....

Henry may be the wittiest playwright of his generation, but he’s hopelessly naïve when it comes to understanding love and infidelity. Writing about betrayal is one thing, living with it is another. After Henry leaves his wife for another woman, he’s confronted with being the cuckold himself. Both dazzlingly clever and emotionally naked, Henry’s search for the “the real thing” in art and love demonstrates beautifully why both are worth the effort in the end.

In Persian folklore, Syngue Sabour is a magical stone, a patience stone, that absorbs the plight of those who confide in it. But here, the Syngue Sabour is not a stone, but a man lying brain-dead. His wife sits by his side, resenting him for not resisting the call to arms, for wanting to be a hero, and in the end, for being incapacitated. Yet she cares, speaking to him, revealing her deepest desires, pains, and secrets.

It begins with just a few people falling ill. Another flu virus that spreads around the globe. And then the reports begin that people are dying.... When most of the world's population is wiped out, a handful of survivors are left to pick up the pieces. Cities become graveyards. Technology becomes largely obsolete. Mankind must start again.

Wuthering Heights is the sole novel of Emily Brontë, who died a year after its publication at the age of 30. A tale of exceptional emotional and imaginative force, it is an arresting vision of metaphysical passion, in which nature and society, heaven and hell, and dynamic and passive forces are powerfully juxtaposed.

Ayckbourn’s celebrated triology The Norman Conquests—three hilarious and poignant plays depicting the same six characters in one house over one weekend, namely Norman and his romantic follies.

Lucy King, a beautiful, young documentary-film producer, races through London, France, and New York to decipher the clues that will eventually lead her to the hidden treasure of the Rose Labyrinth. A sweeping adventure for listeners who loved The Da Vinci Code, featuring a wonderful mix of literary references from Shakespeare to Marquez, The Rose Labyrinth is a romantic novel with a historical twist that tells us that the world we think we know is not all that it appears to be.

Molière wrote some of the most durable and penetrating comedies of all time. The Imaginary Cuckold and The School for Husbands are two of his grand farces of marriage and misunderstanding, one set in Paris and the other in the provinces. In The School for Husbands, a tyrannical husband-to-be seeks to isolate his ward, while unwittingly carrying her messages of devotion to her lover. In The Imaginary Cuckold, an enraged husband imagines his wife is unfaithful, but is reluctant to defend his honor. 

A country house weekend goes haywire when the guests and their hosts play a game of romantic musical chairs. A most delightful madcap comedy.

It begins with just a few people falling ill. Another flu virus that spreads around the globe. And then the reports begin that people are dying.... When most of the world's population is wiped out, a handful of survivors are left to pick up the pieces. Cities become graveyards. Technology becomes largely obsolete. Mankind must start again.... Includes 'Cabin Fever' by Jonathan Morris, 'Contact' by Simon Clark, 'Rescue' by Andrew Smith and 'Leaving' by Matt Fitton.

In Table Manners, the action occurs in the dining room of Mother’s house, where a conventional middle-class family is attempting to have a pleasant country weekend. But they are no match for Norman, the bane of the family, who horrifies everyone by doing exactly as he likes.

In the second “battle” of Ayckbourn’s celebrated triology The Norman Conquests, we rejoin the family weekend, this time hearing the events in the living room, where Norman gets drunk on homemade dandelion wine – and all hell breaks loose. Norman unleashes his merry brand of manipulative charm on the hapless guests and even his most formidable opponents go down in defeat on the drawing room rug.

At 21, the passionate and headstrong Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to rule her own life. When her autocratic father forbids her, via formal letter, from attending a fashionable art-school ball, and even further refuses to allow her advanced study of science, she decides she has no choice but to leave her family home and make a fresh start alone. She escapes the stodgy suburbs to London, enrolling as a student of biology and immersing herself in a world of intellectuals, socialists, and suffragettes.

It's the 1980s, and Alistair Matheson is forging a quietly ambitious path in government. All is going to plan until a brief encounter with a man who looks exactly like him throws Alistair's ordered world into chaos. As this doppelganger crosses his path time and again a series of events are set in motion with increasingly disturbing consequences. Is this double a spy? A conman? Or could he be something infinitely more sinister? Directed by Helen Goldwyn.

The third “battle” of Ayckbourn’s celebrated trilogy The Norman Conquests, returns us to the same weekend in the country, but this time to the setting of Mother’s overgrown English country garden. Something more troublesome than brambles is lurking among the roses. Havoc ensues among the flora and fauna, as this cynical masterpiece makes its way to a hilarious conclusion.