Productions In Development
The Happiness Patrol is currently developing the following productions:
Berenice
adapted from the short story by Edgar Allan Poe
The Happiness Patrol continues its mission to reinvent classic texts by inviting you for a dental check-up which is far from routine… You take your seat and leaf through your magazine. But your reading is disturbed by a scream from the surgery…
Now it’s your turn. The charming dentist conducts a brief examination… But why has the nurse strapped your wrists to the chair? Why is there blood on the dentist’s gown? And what is rattling around inside that box…?
Lie back. Relax. Open wide… And say Aaaaaaah…
The Devil Sent You To Laredo
after Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina
Politicians, ugly buildings and whores are all supposed to get respectable when they get old…but not Celestina!
Having hit sixty and retired from the brothel, Celestina scrapes a living as a part-time witch and a part-time bawd — but it’s hard making ends meet with two grown-up daughters still living at home.
Celestina is happy for her foster-son and his mate to do her dirty work for her, but she’s not so happy when it comes to paying them…
Clack your castanets to the back catalogue of Baccara and join us after the show for a half-hour fiesta of sangria, sombreros and some of the sexiest Spanish disco dancing you’ve ever seen!
More Soup, Mother Superior?
after Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta
Barabas has spent too much time and effort becoming the richest merchant on Malta to let anyone take it away from him — but that’s exactly what Ferneze, the grasping Governor, is trying to do!
To keep his hands on his filthy lucre, Barabas blows up an entire garrison of Turkish soldiers, forces his daughter to convert to Christianity just to recover his buried treasures, and sends the poor nuns a vat of porridge spiked with the most potent poison in the Mediterranean!
Look out, Malta! Hell hath no Fury like Barabas scorned!
A Real Snake, Ten Minutes Before The End
after William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Mark Antony was once the terror of the Western world, the man who avenged Julius Caesar’s death by driving Brutus and Cassius to suicide. But now he spends all his time with Cleopatra, lounging by a swimming pool in Egypt, getting sunburn, getting fat on a diet of sugary dates and not getting any exercise.
But back in Rome, Octavius is about to run out of patience with them both. He arranges a marriage of convenience to make Antony toe the line, and when that doesn’t work, he sends the full Roman fleet charging across the Mediterranean.
Deserted by their allies and with their ships destroyed, Antony and Cleopatra’s grand tragic romance looks doomed — so they take their fate into their own hands, with a rusty sword and a real snake, ten minutes before the end…
Also in development…
Ring/Finger after The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley
The Sick Wolf Upstairs, after John Gabriel Borkman, by Henrik Ibsen
Snakebite, after Philoctetes, by Sophocles
Don’t Touch The Axe, after The Oresteia, by Aeschylus
