Raindrops on a White Pear Blossom

The Fletcher Players bring Raindrops on a White Pear Blossom to The Corpus Playroom from 4 to 7 November, with each performance starting at 19:00. It's a story about a mother and daughter untangling their past, present and future, and it's being presented as a script-reading rather than a fully staged production.

That's because it's part of Blank Canvas, a series of three new long-form plays by marginalised writers. The reading is a way of getting the work in front of an audience before it's fully worked out for the stage. The reviewer Millie Wooler praised the core narrative, and the plan is for the play to make its full debut the following Michaelmas, once it's been refined. If you've got a soft spot for seeing new writing find its feet, this is exactly that kind of thing.

There's a bit of history to the room it's playing in, too. The Corpus Playroom opened in 1979, founded by Caroline Oulten and Mark McCrum in disused rooms on St Edward's Passage. For nearly forty years it's been a starting point for names like Hugh Bonneville, Sam Mendes, Emma Corrin and Stephen Fry, who wrote the play Latin! for its opening. The Fletcher Players, the college's amateur dramatic society and resident company, run the venue and focus on funding new writing through showcases like Smörgåsbord.

So, Raindrops on a White Pear Blossom is one of three new plays in the Blank Canvas series, staged as a script-reading by the Fletcher Players at The Corpus Playroom, Corpus Christi College. It runs from 4 to 7 November, with the curtain going up at 19:00 each night.