The QUADS Autumn 2008 Double Bill Plays were:
My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier
Relatively Speaking, by Alan Ayckbourn

An exciting departure from the normal autumn show in 2008 - two different productions on alternating nights, Wednesday to Saturday, over a two-week period. Two different casts, a drama and a comedy… and both plays performed in the round.

Belper News review of the QUADS Double Bill

                               My Cousin Rachel

My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier, published in 1951. Like the earlier Rebecca, it is a mystery-romance, largely set on a large estate in Cornwall.

Phillip Ashley has been brought up by his cousin Ambrose, to whom he is devoted, on Ambrose's Cornish estate. While travelling in Italy for his health, Ambrose meets and falls in love with Rachel, another cousin who was the penniless widow of an Italian count. Ambrose soon dies and Philip inherits the estate.

Rachel returns to England, and Philip is subjected to contradictory forces: he falls in love with her, but at the same time evidence grows that Ambrose died under suspicious circumstances...

The book's title reflects Philip's consistent references to Rachel as "my cousin Rachel" right up to the moment he realizes he is in love with her.

A film of My Cousin Rachel, starring Richard Burton and Olivia de Havilland was made in 1952, and a television adaptation, starring Christopher Guard and Geraldine Chaplin, in 1983.

Derby Evening Telegraph review of My Cousin Rachel
 

                               Relatively Speaking

Relatively Speaking is a 1965 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, originally titled Meet My Father. The London production of Relatively Speaking in 1967 at the Duke of York's Theatre helped to launch Richard Briers' career, and it also featured Michael Hordern and Celia Johnson.

The action of the play takes place during a summer weekend in the bed-sitting room of Ginny’s London flat and on the garden patio of Sheila and Philip’s country home. The time is 1965.

Greg and Ginny are in love and planning to be married. Greg finds a strange pair of slippers under the bed and is too besotted to believe they might have been left by another man (which would also explain the bunches of flowers and boxes of candy filling Ginny’s apartment). When Ginny goes off for a day the country—supposedly to visit her parents but actually to break things off with her older married lover, Philip—Greg decides to follow her...  The situation is further complicated by a series of hilarious misunderstandings until no-one (including the audience) can be exactly sure who’s in love with whom.

Derby Evening Telegraph review of Relatively Speaking