About the Play:

Donkeys' Years has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues.

Donkeys' Years is a full-length farce by Michael Frayn, the Tony Award-winning author of Copenhagen. Old boys, passing years and lost loves are featured in Donkeys' Years, a zany, hilarious farce set in a men only university college to which six students have returned for a reunion dinner. Finding themselves locked in the building overnight the graduates relive their youth, reviving past friendships and feuds.

Donkeys' Years is about a reunion dinner at a "lesser college" of an "older university" attended by a number of graduates now in their early forties and mostly in responsible, influential positions. All starts smoothly with conventional greetings and old boy reminiscences. A slightly discordant note is struck by Snell, an ex-undergraduate of such insignificance that everyone has forgotten him, and continues to forget him from one moment to the next. As the night goes on, the alcohol loosens inhibitions causing surprising behaviour in those in positions of political, academic or spiritual authority. Into the resulting revelry stumbles Lady Driver, the now very proper Master's wife who used to be the good-time girl on the all-male campus, short-sightedly searching for the lost love of her youth. The insignificant Snell sees in her the chance to make up for all the opportunities of undergraduate life he missed before. In the ensuing pandemonium, the much lusted after Lady Driver becomes the eye of the storm, trying not to get caught in a compromising situation, whilst the 'gentlemen' not only risk their reputations being sullied but also face the perils of excommunication, psychotic breakdown, murder, defenestration and drowning – but not necessarily in that order!

Donkeys' Years premiered in 1976 at the Globe Theatre in the West End of London. It won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy of the Year and there have been a number of acclaimed revivals.

Cast: 1 female, 8 male

What people say:

"The show reaches that plateau of comic bliss when it becomes physically impossible to stop laughing." — Daily Telegraph (London)

"The West End's summer gets off to an exhilarating start with the hilarious return of Michael Frayn's comedy Donkeys' Years." — Sunday Express (London)

"All the confidence of a serious comic masterpiece. Masterclass performances. This is one of the best revivals in the West End for years. Unmissable." — Sunday Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Michael Frayn has written plays, novels, and screenplays, in addition to being a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and translator of Chekhov. His thirteen plays include Copenhagen, which was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk awards and, in the United Kingdom, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards. His novel Headlong was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Born in London in 1933 and educated at Cambridge, Frayn is married to the biographer and critic Claire Tomalin; they live in London.