Books by Paul Thain

As the children walk in with their lighted candles, and the Storyteller takes us back to a small Russian village, the scene is set for this magical Christmas story. Papa Panov, the old shoemaker, now almost too blind to thread a needle, has a dream that Jesus will visit him on Christmas Day. All day he waits for him, but the only visitors he has are a tramp, a roadsweeper and a woman with a baby. Selflessly he gives them his coat, his money and his soup. As he falls asleep in the evening, tired, ridiculed and disappointed, he has another dream in which it appears that his special visitor did come after all... This adaptation of a story by Leo Tolstoy, narrated by a Storyteller and involving an unlimited cast of children, is a perfect play for Christmas.

Lord Arlington is dead, poisoned. His daughter, obsessed by Hamlet, is convinced that her mother and a family friend are responsible and so sets out to exact a terrible revenge. Madness, murder, passion, and retribution are themes of this play, set in the Edwardian era, but with modern sensibility.

The wise Sophia enters a starving village and declares she will feed everyone with her magical stone soup, thereby gradually encouraging the villagers to share their own hoarded goods for the benefit of the community. She is labelled a subversive by the autocratic government figure, General Mayhem, who attempts to nationalize the pot of soup and place it under government control. However, the play ends with the cast and audience alike dancing merrily.Large flexible cast