A production of Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment will be coming to the Cambridge Junction on Friday 26th and Saturday 27th February. The play is almost completely unknown but almost precisely contemporary with – and clearly not entirely unlike – Shakespeare’s later romantic comedies. There are eight new songs in the production, all original compositions using Marston’s lyrics. More information below:

In Renaissance London, the cynical Ned Planet observes the changing fortunes of two aristocratic heiresses and their social network: Katherine is courted by the impoverished but loyal Pasquil, the conniving usurer Master Mammon, and the ridiculous Master Puff, while her sister, Camelia, vacillates between an army of suitors according to the self-interested advice of her serving maid, Winifred. Meanwhile, Winifred conducts her own intrigues surrounding the extravagant Frenchman John fo’ de King, who will do anything to get a ‘vench’. 

John Marston’s acerbic city comedy was last performed by the Children of Paul’s in 1600. With its obsession with lust, money and double-dealing and its dense Shakespearean allusion, Jack Drum’s Entertainment is the best Elizabethan comedy you’ve never seen. Jack Drum’s Entertainment will be performed by a new group of 11 to 19 year-olds from The Young Actors Company, one of the most highly regarded theatre companies in Cambridgeshire, especially trained by leading academics and practitioners from King’s College London and University College London. It will brought back to life in a Georgian setting, with Marston’s original lyrics set to fresh compositions, performed live by the company.

More information here.