ACA Presents : Stags and Hens

ACA Presents...

Stags & Hens

Written by Willy Russell, directed by Johann Walraven and featuring members of the Graduating Company of 2024.

Performance will start promptly, please arrive at least 10 minutes early.

About this play:

"Willy Russell's Stags and Hens is a magnificently vulgar assault on the threadbare idyll of young love and marriage. An engaged couple unwittingly roll up at the same seedy club for their stag/hen parties." —Guardian

The action of the play takes place in the Ladies and Gents toilets of a Liverpool club where Dave and Linda have decided, unbeknownst to each other, to hold their respective stag and hen parties.

“Uniquely for a play of mine, Stags & Hens began with the idea for its setting. I was aware of existing plays set in club-land – in bars and on dance-floors – but none that had ever dared to locate its action in the ladies and gents toilets… this club/dancehall-toilets idea also had built-in theatrical credibility; having the action take place not on the dance-floor or the bars or the corridors but in the toilets meant that at a stroke I’d solved one of the crucial questions in the making of any play, ie, how to convincingly bring the action before the eye of the audience. And in this play, where better or more natural to locate the action than in these toilets where I knew from my own attempts at a mis-spent youth, that on nights such as this, all the really crucial stuff, the juicy stuff, the scandal, the plotting, the dreams and hopes and defeats and failures and fights – all of this got aired not out there on the dance-floor but, respectively, in the ladies and the gents.” — Willy Russell

Cast: Ava McClean, Hunter Taylor, Cameron Sutton, Chester Lenihan, Ben Itaba, Jonah Elias, Jonathan Pacchiarotta, Grace Easterby, Madeleine Zinner, Ellen Peebles and Kirra Jones.

Running time:

Act 1 - 55 minutes
20 minute interval
Act 2 - 55 minutes

Content warning: Coarse language, simulated violence, and smoking

Illustration: Madeleine Zinner