Movies: Alec McCowen

Fed up with working hard just to scrape by, Christine Painter comes up with a bold plan to become the madam of a brothel and earn her financial freedom: she opens a house of spanking to fabulous reviews....

Divorced couple Amanda and Elyot have both recently remarried. On their honeymoons, however, they discover that they have accidentally booked adjoining suites at the same hotel. Containing some of Coward's best dialogue, the play revolves around the ...

A woman is unhappy in her marriage to a boring, stiff judge, so she takes up with a wild-living RAF pilot, who ends up being more than she can handle....

Following a nervous breakdown, Gwen takes up the job of head teacher in the small village of Haddaby. There she can benefit from the tranquillity and peace, enabling her to recover fully. But under the facade of idyllic country life she slowly uneart...

The Peloponnesian Wars (Athens versus Sparta for twenty-seven years) told in the format of news broadcast-like monologues by Theucydides, Plato, and others....

Len climbs Veronica and Percy’s fence intent on burglary, but what really happens next? The three acts of the play show the incident from each of the three perspectives....

The life of King Henry the Fifth....

For a poet with a gift for crafting words into barbs, Stevie Smith lives a relatively conventional life. Sheltered in a London suburb, she spends her days engaged in tedious housework, crafting verse and conversing with her aunt. But while her body m...

During the Italian Renaissance, Pope Julius II contracts the influential artist Michelangelo to sculpt 40 statues for his tomb. When the pope changes his mind and asks the sculptor to paint a mural in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo doubts his paint...

At the start of World War II, Cmdr. Ericson is assigned to convoy escort HMS Compass Rose with inexperienced officers and men just out of training. The winter seas make life miserable enough, but the men must also harden themselves to rescuing surviv...

An account of how Lech Walesa and the "Solidarity" trade union confronted the might of Communist dictatorship in Poland....

On a cold day in January 1850, a group of travelling actors arrive out of the snow at the remote country estate of Count Horvath, in eastern Hungary. The Count is delighted to have an excuse for re-opening the old family theatre, closed since his chi...

After a chance meeting and an indiscreet conversation, childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley become involved in a convoluted intrigue led by a mysterious man known simply as Mr. Brown....

Alec Graham is sentenced to death for the murder of his girlfriend Jennie, with whom he spent a weekend at the English country home of the parents of his friend Brian Stanford. Alec’s father, David Graham, a not-so-successful writer and alcoholic who...

An insecure, aggressive widow of a tea garden manager reluctantly develops an affectionate relationship with an Indian housewife and her family....

Viola and Sebastian are lookalike twins, separated by a shipwreck. Viola lands in Illyria, where she disguises herself like her brother and goes into the service of the Duke Orsino. Orsino sends her to help him woo the Lady Olivia, who doesn't want t...

Two young gentlemen living in 1890s England use the same pseudonym ('Ernest') on the sly, which is fine until they both fall in love with women using that name, which leads to a comedy of mistaken identities....

Based on the true story of Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, the only German prisoner of war captured in Britain to escape back to Germany during the Second World War....

At his mother's funeral, stuffy bank clerk Henry Pulling meets his Aunt Augusta, an elderly eccentric with more-than-shady dealings who pulls him along on a whirlwind adventure as she attempts to rescue an old lover....

A moral philosopher at a university finds his own morals under scrutiny....