FOR its next production, Ruislip Dramatic Society returns to the Compass Theatre with the Alan Bennett comedy, Habeas Corpus.  

Set in 1970s Hove, this saucy postcard of a play invites you to hop aboard a satirical merry-go-round with the Wicksteed family.

Take a seemingly respectable doctor and his wife along with their hypochondriac son. Add a young lady patient to whom the doctor takes a fancy, but who in turn takes an interest in his son.

Meanwhile, the doctor's sister is more concerned about her flat chest than her courtship with the limp but good-natured vicar, Canon Throbbing.

Finally, stir it all with the President of the British Medical Association and an assortment of characters including a bra-fitter salesman from Leatherhead, and you are left with a Bennett masterpiece.

Now 89, Bennett is revered for his plays, The Madness of George III and The History Boys, as well as his TV monologues, Talking Heads.

He declined both a knighthood and a CBE, not because of any anti-royalist sentiment but purely because he considered them a formal burden.   

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Habeas Corpus shows him at his best in a farcical comedy filled with mistaken identity, mismanaged lust and Bennett’s razor-sharp wit.

November 15-18, 7.45pm, at the Compass Theatre, Glebe Avenue, Ickenham. Tickets: £14 or £13 concessions (available on Wed/Thu only) Book online at www.ruislipdramatic.org and www.hillingdontheatres.uk

Call Ruislip Dramatic Society on 01895 632300 or the Compass on 01895 250615.