THE BLUE COMET Makes its Stateside Debut This Month

Ninety-six years ago, prolific English playwright Eden Phillpotts debuted the play The Blue Comet, about a middle-class family struggling to maintain its standard of living against a backdrop of rising prices, stagnant income, and an apocalyptic threat. Family members bicker over faith-based vs. "trust-the-science" approaches to the crisis. Any similarities with our current time were surely unintended. They do, however, create the perfect opportunity for a national premiere of this long-lost comedy.

Falconbridge Players will present a staged reading of The Blue Comet on Tuesday August 23 at 7 PM in the Community Room at the Madison Police Department Midtown Station, 4020 Mineral Point Road. It is the first known performance of the play in the United States, having premiered in 1926 in Birmingham, England and copyrighted in the US in the following year. That copyright is now expired, placing The Blue Comet in the public domain.

Set in Hampstead, England, the Blue Comet covers two months in the lives of the Bedale family, whose quiet lives of book collecting and artisanal chicken farming are disrupted by two cataclysmic events. Firstly, a rogue comet is closing in on Earth, expected to crash into the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of 500,000 miles an hour. Secondly, a rogue Australian relative crashes into the household and upsets all its natural equilibrium.