Astronomer's Garden & Beached

Synopsis

THE ASTRONOMER'S GARDEN: "While its base is the vicious rivalry between Astronomer Royal Flamsteed and Halley calculating longitude, its true subjects are class, sex and the real world they cannot catalogue.

Hood paints the two, irresistibly, as bombastic old sticks, but the play's real strength is its exploration of relationships, showing how Flamsteed's wife and maid navigate male ego-infested waters."

BEACHED: "A couple of young runaways, cast up on the beach of a bird sanctuary, cling to the wreckage of their lives and try to construct some kind of future from the fragments of their emotionally and physically brutalised pasts.

Harsh, tender and moving."