The Players

Towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth the First, a group of the period's most influential women wait at the house of the Countess of Derby for the arrival of a troupe of travelling players. As they wait they engage in a battle of wits and wills that will shape both their world, and our own.

Intriguing, mysterious, and often wryly funny, The Players reveals where power truly lay in the Elizabethan age, and why. The play peels back some of the assumptions that still surround the period for modern audiences, and challenges the absurd idea that its leading women were merely passive observers of their times.

It offers audiences a direct way in to a proper and full appreciation of this extraordinary period in our country?s history, that avoids a too-often incomplete and lazy way of imagining our past - that might be summed up in a simple question: 'Do you think that women in any time or society weren't fully involved in the affairs of their world?'