The Summer Palace

When an internationally acclaimed theatre director working under a totalitarian regime is brought in for questioning, he thinks his political activism is under scrutiny. But the person facing him across a desk in an otherwise empty room turns out to be an actor he hasn’t seen for nearly twenty years, and they have unfinished business. The director begins to realise that the interrogation isn’t quite what it seems as the personal and the political become dangerously intertwined and the stakes are raised in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. The twists and turns of darkly comedic stage play mark the return to the theatre of writer Paul Bassett Davies, who began his career in experimental multimedia performance before moving to radio and television, where he worked with some of the biggest names in British comedy and drama. He is author of four published novels and several stories, one of which was praised by Stephen King as “Mordantly funny... Poe would have liked it".