Fred and Madge

Joe Orton's brilliantly inventive and staggeringly bold first play. Fred and Madge are a normal couple. Or so we think until a director and an audience member start interrupting and reworking this play within a play. Exhilaratingly subversive, the play includes the destruction of the Festival Hall, professional insulters intent on purging society with laughter and a dystopian England overgrown with marigolds. Full of biting satire and sardonic wit, it mingles astutely observed social realism with myth: Fred's job is to push boulders up a hill, and Madge's is to sieve water. Written in 1959, Fred & Madge finally received its premiere in 2014 at the Hope Theatre, London.