Rushen Players

Three One Act Plays

Thursday 10h to Saturday 14th APRIL 2025
Curtain 7:30pm
Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin

A Bench at the Edge & Late Entry - Also at:

MADF Easter Festival of Plays
Saturday 19th & Sunday 20th April 2025
Gaiety Theatre, Douglas

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These notes are to provide a little more background information to the play
than we are able to fit in the paper programme

Director’s Notes

Welcome to the Rushen Players’ production of Three One Act Plays

A Bench at the Edge by Luigi Jannuzzi

"Depending on how you use it, I guess, thought is our salvation and our damnation” – Person One

A Bench at the Edge by American playwright Luigi Jannuzzi explores ideas surrounding life, death and suicide.
A chance encounter of two people at the edge of an abyss develops into a conversation about what drives people to this place
and what makes them want to keep on living.

Luigi Jannuzzi, born in 1952, studied philosophy and ethics before going on to write award-winning
one-act and full- length plays and screenplays.
In 1998 and 2000 he was a finalist in the Eugene O'Neill National Playwriting Conference.
A Bench At The Edge won best one-act play in Ireland in 1999 and in the United Kingdom in 2001.
His avant-garde plays combine absurdist comedy with serious themes of the human condition, including mental health.

A Bench At The Edge explores the damage people are capable of inflicting on themselves and on others,
but through its wit and humour allows the audience to think about
issues of death and suicide--to contemplate the abyss--without being driven to despair.
In the end, the play is life-affirming, despite its sombre and at times disturbing subject matter.

Late Entry by David Tristram

David Tristram (born 1957 or 1958, Quarry Bank, UK) is an English comic playwright.
He has published 33 plays and comedy novels, and produced and directed three films.
Widely performed by amateur and professional groups, his plays have parodied
such pop-culture genres as soap operas and detective stories.

Educated at Dudley Grammar School and Birmingham University, where he studied English and music,
Tristram was a commercial copywriter before turning to comedy.
In 1985 he founded the Flying Ducks Theatre Company, which has now become a professional touring company.
The enterprise has expanded into the Flying Ducks Group, which stages conferences and other events,
provides audio-visual and Internet production services, and represents actors.

Tristram's plays take a farcical view of sex, alcohol, drugs, crime, politics, and theatre itself.
Tristram claims he writes only comedy because he cannot take himself too seriously.
He usually tests his new work at a small theatre in Bridgnorth near his home in Highley before wider release.
His plays have been performed in South Africa,
New Zealand, Mexico and Europe among other locations.

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