Bleak Expectations (NHB Modern Plays)

The story Charles Dickens might have written after drinking too much gin…

Follow half-orphan Pip Bin’s remarkable adventures with sisters Pippa and Poppy and best friend Harry Biscuit, as they attempt to escape the scheming clutches of Mr Gently Benevolent and defeat the irrepressible Hardthrasher siblings. Can they avert disaster at every turn? Will evil be vanquished by virtue? Can love triumph over hate?

Mark Evans’ play Bleak Expectations is a hilarious, chaotic caper, featuring dastardly villains, preposterous names, pulse-quickening romances, heart-rending death scenes, and, of course, a happy ending.

Based on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, the play opened at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, in 2022, directed by Caroline Leslie.

It offers rich opportunities to amateur theatre companies looking for a gloriously daft Dickensian romp which will have their audiences joyfully transported and begging for more.

‘Dickens with a dash of Monty Python… nimbly combines period detail with a sense of the absurd… immaculately polished puns and in-jokes’
- The Times

‘A fast-paced comedy mashup that sends up Britishness with oodles of silliness… zings with intelligence, imagination and comic anarchy’
- Guardian

‘Cheek-achingly funny… a ceaseless stream of quick one-liners that delivers laugh after laugh of pure entertainment… a great night out’
- Broadway World

‘A gloriously comic mash-up… hurrah, huzzah and harrumble!’
- WhatsOnStage

‘Witty, hilarious… filled with so much fun and comic cleverness with tongue-in-cheek humour and many in-jokes… sparkles with inventiveness’
- British Theatre Guide