About the Play:

The White Liars and Black Comedy contains two comedic one-acts by Peter Shaffer. The White Liars brings two surprisingly linked men together to get their fortunes told. In Black Comedy, a blackout occurs on the night a young sculptor plans to meet his debutante's millionaire father and a wealthy patron. The plays may be presented separately or form the double-bill of The White Liars and Black Comedy.

White Liars depicts a fateful encounter between a down and out fortune teller, a rock musician and his agent. The agent bribes Baroness Lemberg to fake some hocus pocus over a crystal ball, ostensibly to discourage the musician from pursuing his girlfriend. The trickery entangles each of them in a dense web of mendacity. Recently revived at The Roundabout Theatre in New York with Black Comedy, White Liars is a sharply etched study of characters steeped in deception.

Cast : 1 woman, 2 men

What people say White Liars:

"Farce with a capital F." — Christian Science Monitor

"A tour de force." — New York Newsday

"A lot of fun." — New Yorker

In Black Comedy, the action supposedly in the dark is illuminated; when the lights are to be on, the stage is the dark. Lovesick and desperate, sculptor Brindsley Miller has embellished his apartment with furniture and objects d'arte "borrowed" from the absent antique collector next door hoping to impress his fiancées pompous father and a wealthy art dealer, Schuppanzigh. The fussy neighbour, Harold Gorringe returns just as a blown fuse plunges the apartment into darkness and Brindsley is revealed teetering on the verge of very ripe farce. Unexpected guests, aging spinsters, errant phone cords and other snares impede his frantic attempts to return the purloined items before light is restored.

Cast : 3 women, 5 men

What people say Black Comedy:

"[One of] the funniest and most brilliant short plays in the language." — Sunday Times (London)

"Pure hilarity." — International Herald Tribune

"Laughter mounts steadily." — The New York Times

"Hilarious." — New York Post

"A dazzling comic ballet." — New York Daily News

"It is still possible to laugh yourself into a hernia watching Black Comedy." — USA Today

"An orgy of blind slapstick brilliantly sustained." — Sunday Express

About the Playwright:

Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBE (1926-2016) was an English playwright and screenwriter. He is familiar to North American audiences as the author of Amadeus and Equus, two of the most successful plays of the postwar era, and of a string of other award-winning plays, several of which have been turned into films.