Short Plays

Eliza Shakespeare

She slips through the shadows of Shakespeare's London, a figure whose identity flickers between sovereign and muse, leaving even the Bard uncertain whom he addresses. Her presence forces a collision between royal authority and artistic desire, making every exchange a duel of wit and concealment. Whether flesh or fantasy, she embodies the dangerous intimacy between power and the imagination that gives the play its charge.

O'Flaherty

O'Flaherty stands trapped between two irreconcilable loyalties: the British army that decorated him and the rebel mother who raised him to pray for England's ruin. His easy charm and evasions cannot disguise the panic beneath, for he loves the old woman too much to shatter her illusions. The comedy of his homecoming sharpens into something more painful as every greeting threatens to expose the lie he never quite told.

Cashel Byron

Cashel moves through the world with a boxer's blunt honesty and an unexpected gift for blank verse, equally at home trading blows with Zulu kings and trading barbs with aristocrats. His love for Lydia Carew pulls him toward a life he was never bred for, while his profession drags him back into the ring. The tension between raw physical power and the delicate manners of the drawing room makes him both ridiculous and genuinely admirable.

Gregory Juno

Gregory is a self-described good man who promised his dying mother he would never make love to a married woman, a promise he is currently breaking with agonizing awareness. His paralysis is both comic and genuinely painful: he wants to flee, knows he should, and finds his will utterly useless against the woman beside him. His helpless honesty about his own weakness exposes the absurd gap between moral principle and human impulse that the play exists to probe.

Lydia Carew

Lydia owns Wiltstoken and everything in it, yet her wealth and wisdom have only taught her how isolated she is, surrounded by suitors who bore her and books that fail to satisfy. When Cashel Byron crashes into her solitude, his raw vitality offers exactly the escape she has been craving. Her struggle to reconcile her intellectual pride with her attraction to a man of the ring drives the play's central comedy of class and desire.

Mrs. Lunn

Mrs. Lunn is attractive, witty, and disarmingly honest about the pleasure she takes in dangerous flirtation, even as she insists she does not wish to be wicked. Her clear-eyed observation that virtue holds only when the parties are two or three yards apart gives the play its sharpest comic insight. She and Gregory are mirrors of each other's weakness, and their mutual inability to part makes the drawing room a battlefield of manners and appetite.