Fred and Madge

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. Fred & Madge was Joe Orton's brilliantly inventive and staggeringly bold first play, written in 1959, but not performed until 2014 at the Hope Theatre, London. Orton's other plays include Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. He also wrote the novel Between Us Girls, the Beatles' screenplay Up Against It, and the now famous Orton Diaries. -- from back cover.