This brand new comedy is set around Floss’s 50th Birthday party where she poses a simple request to her siblings…or so she thought. After all, she has been the sole carer for their ill mother for twenty-five years so it’s fair enough she wants to get away, right? Between the rock of resentment and the hard place of intergenerational trauma, this might not be the renaissance Floss was dreaming of. Chuck in exploding secrets and illicit affairs and you might just have the family argument of the year.
Grace Bartle is a playwright from Oxfordshire. She holds an MA in Scriptwriting from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Malcolm Bradbury Trust Scholarship in Scriptwriting. In 2024, her first play was performed at INK festival of short plays in Suffolk. She was then accepted onto the Menagerie Writers’ Group at Cambridge Junction. She directed her debut full length production, Mercy of Sisters, at the Combe Hub in June 2026 — a sold-out three-night run. She is delighted to be returning to the Oxford theatre scene, having been a proud member of Pegasus Youth Theatre as a teenager.
Reviews:
‘In young Grace Bartle we are nurturing the next Alan Ayckbourn.’ – Libby Purves, Theatre Critic
‘A strong, swift plot… an all-too-recognisably charmless, dysfunctional, mad family world.’ – Sally Wainwright, Television Writer and Producer
‘A delight from beginning to end’ – James Kent, Director