Synopsis

First produced in 1941, this frenzied, madcap black comedy has become world famous through the Frank Capra film starring Cary Grant.

The story revolves around the theatre-hating drama critic Mortimer Brewster and his two sweet and thoughtful old aunts Martha and Abby. On the same evening as Mortimer gets engaged to next door neighbour, Elaine, he accidentally discovers that his dear aunts have developed a very bad habit: they poison lonely old men with their homemade elderberry wine (laced with arsenic, strychnine and a pinch of cyanide), in order to save them from the sorrows of this world. They then leave it to their crazy but harmless nephew Teddy (who believes he is President Teddy Roosevelt) to dig graves in the cellar for those “yellow fever casualties working on the Panama Canal”. Just as Mortimer tries to get a grip on this situation, his long lost murderous brother Jonathan reappears looking like Boris Karloff after a badly performed plastic surgery with his alcoholic accomplice Dr. Einstein and a dead body in tow. The seemingly idyllic Brewster home now finally turns into a complete madhouse in which Mortimer has to try to save his sanity as well as his life.

There will be one intermission of twenty minutes.

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No photographs or recording a llowed in the theatre
without prior permission from the management.

Originally produced on Broadway by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.
Presented by arrangement with Josef Weinberger Limited.