Under the Blue Sky by David Eldridge

One of Eldridge’s earliest plays, this will be the first professional production since the play’s storming West End run. Akin to a teachers' La Ronde, this production deals with romantic and sexual agony among the academic classes in a wittily and circular fashion. Confronting morality in a world where there is a great expectation to be morally complete, are teachers fit to teach if they can’t teach themselves?

After sleeping together once, Nick and Helen have remained friends for three years, but tensions start to rise when Nick talks about leaving to take a new job at a public school. In the next vignette, an extremely drunken Michelle is determined to sleep with her forced confidant, the desperate and obsessive history teacher Graham. But her recount of her various sexual escapades end in tears and a disturbing role reversal. Finally, two older teachers, Robert and Anne, who have spent the school holidays together for many years, look up at the sky and begin to hope they can be happy.

In three subtly linked acts, three pairs of teachers discuss love and lust with boldness and honesty, as Eldridge studies unrequited affection, obsession, sex, and if we can learn morality.