Finborough Theatre Presents Cicely Hamilton's JUST TO GET MARRIED

"It takes a confirmed spinster to be as sentimental as you are. What's to happen to me if I don't marry - what's to be the end of me?"

The first London production in over a hundred years of Just To Get Married, a romantic comedy by renowned suffragette Cicely Hamilton opens at the Finborough Theatre for a four week limited season on Tuesday, 25 July 2017 (Press Nights: Thursday, 27 July and Friday, 28 July 2017 at 7.30pm).

Approaching her 30th birthday in early 20th Century England, the clever and poor Georgiana Vicary is waiting for the handsome but shy Adam Lankester to propose to her.

Her friends expect her to get married, her adoptive parents expect it and more importantly, she expects it of herself - but will her conscience allow it?

From a time when marriage was a socio-economic - rather than just a romantic - decision, Just to Get Married asks how we can have a marriage of equals when the genders are unequal.

Written by actress, journalist, playwright and suffragette Cicely Hamilton, and first produced at the Little Theatre in London in 1910, Just to Get Married was last produced in the UK at Birmingham Rep in 1918, and is directed by Melissa Dunne, founder of the acclaimed gender blind play festival XY.

Playwright Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952) co-founded the Women Writers' Suffrage League and supplied the lyrics for The March of the Women, the anthem of Mrs Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union. Known for her novel and play Diana of Dobson's (1908), revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 2007, her polemic Marriage as a Trade (1909), and her play How The Vote Was Won (rediscovered at the Finborough Theatre in 2003), Hamilton also wrote A Pageant of Great Women, a highly successful women's suffrage play based on the ideas of her friend, the theatre director Edith Craig. During the First World War, Hamilton joined the army as an auxiliary nurse. After the war, she worked extensively as a freelance journalist writing about issues such as birth control.

Director Melissa Dunne is a theatre director, writer and dramaturg. She is Artistic Director of Papercut Theatre and has directed work in venues as diverse as Theatre503, Arcola Theatre, the Houses of Parliament and the Royal Festival Hall. Direction includes I'm Not Jesus Christ (Theatre N16, supported by the Romanian Cultural Institute), I Still Get Excited When I See A Ladybird (Theatre503), Extraction (Etcetera Theatre) and The Space Between My Head and My Body (Theatre503 and Edinburgh Festival). She founded and continues to creatively manage the acclaimed XY playwriting festival which has been produced at Hackney Showroom, Latitude Festival, Pleasance Edinburgh and Theatre503. She has read scripts for the literary departments of the National Theatre, Bush Theatre, the Verity Bargate Award and Soho Theatre. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

For tickets and more information visit http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/.

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