Shakespeare Globe

Bedlam

A new play by Nell Leyshon

Until 1 October
To book tickets online please click here »

'Leyshon treats us to a sprawling vision of London’s Georgian excesses. It’s chaotic, rambunctious and at times saucily amusing... Barbara Marten is dignified as Carew’s neglected wife, and Sam Crane has fun as a foppish poetaster' Evening Standard

'Sharp work from Finty Williams as a bossy society gal, and Ella Smith deliciously lives up to her description as 'a sauce box'' Daily Mail

18th-century London, noisy and chaotic. Bedlam - the city’s ancient hospital for the insane - is under the influence of Dr Sidney Carew for whom profit and lechery come before prevention or cure. But with the arrival of a lovely country girl and the appointment of a more enlightened governor, Carew’s inhuman regime starts to crumble, along with his own sanity.

With a cast of doctors, patients, poets, christians and cannibals, and set against an anarchic backdrop of binge drinkers and ballad singers, Bedlam is an asylum for lust, rage, comedy, song and romance.

Nell Leyshon won the 2005 Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award for Comfort Me With Apples. She will be the first female playwright to be performed at Shakespeare's Globe.

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