Love Bites

Men and women in relationship. Four plays by Steve Gooch. Includes Good For You, Red Emma and her Hobo King, Eve and Adam (and the Boys), and Star Turns. For purchasing details please see the Publications page.

Good For You

Two-hander. Mike and Sally are on a weekend ‘relationships therapy’ retreat to try to patch up their crumbling affair, escaping the pressures of the firm they both work for, his wife and family, and her dying mother. She anticipates an in-depth analysis with no holds barred, he’s dreading and ducking it. Real life inevitably intrudes.

Red Emma and her Hobo King

When the famous anarchist agitator Emma Goldman, hounded by the police and looking for a friendly meeting-hall in Chicago, walks into Ben Reitman’s office, she doesn’t count on falling passionately in love. As for Ben, the self-styled ‘King of the Hoboes’ doesn’t count on his unreliable movements being viewed with suspicion by Emma’s political cronies. Communicating at first through letters, Ben persuades the charismatic speaker to take him on as her business manager and minder. But then money starts to go missing.

Eve and Adam (and the Boys)

The old, old story, not as you’re “liable to hear in the Bible”, but rather updating the popular myth for the post-feminist age.

Star Turns

Based on the Elizabethan classic by John Lyly, brother to the Astronomer Royal. Three women in the suburbs take advantage of their menfolk being away on a footballing weekend to indulge in some girlie speculation about astrology. Who, according to the stars, would make the perfect man? Not Doug, surely?