The debut run has been announced for Cul-de-Sac, the new play from WhatsOnStage and multi
OffWestEnd Award-nominated playwright David Shopland (Saving Britney, 2022 The Other
Palace/UK Tour; Raising Kane, 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Assembly Venues;
Lessons Learned, 2017 National Theatre of China). Presented by Fake Escape, the acclaimed
company behind the multi-five-star, sell-out Off Broadway hit Saving Britney, Cul-de-Sac is
heading to Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre for its first ever performances from late May.
With the precision of a scalpel and the unpredictability of a slammed door, Cul-de-Sac is a witty
and wine-soaked post-mortem dissection of contemporary Britain, in which Shopland peels back
the layers of Millennial civility with unflinching honesty. Tackling everything from cultural
identity to the ever-increasing price of a London pint, Cul-de-Sac gives voice to the broken
millennial suburbanite experience. It’s a story about people finding themselves in the middle:
middle-age, middle-class, neither urban nor rural, mid-journey in their careers and mid-journey
in their existences
Located in Northwood Hills, Zone 6 London, otherwise referred to as The Middle of Nowhere,
we meet four characters: Ruth is questioning every decision she’s ever made; Simon is grappling
with a personality he can’t quite define; Marie is keeping a secret that could shatter everything
and Frank, who just desperately wants his driveway back. What starts as a quiet evening rapidly
unravels, as polite smiles give way to sharp words, truths spill as freely as the booze, and when
an unexpected guest arrives, the night explodes into chaos. Cul-de-S
Writer and Director David Shopland comments, Millennials often feel trapped between worlds;
we grew with technology, we weren’t born into the technological age. We straddle the past and
the future in a way unique perhaps to any other generation given the acceleration of, well,
everything. I think because of this, a lot of us feel lost. A lot of us stumbled into lives that actually
weren’t meant for us, and a lot of us didn’t realise until it was far too late. I wanted to spend a
night looking through the window at some of these people. I wanted to do it with humour, and I
wanted to do it with objectivity.