Cat With the Green Violin

The first new play in the new theatre centres around the extraordinary life of Louis Wain and his five sisters. Wain was born in 1860 and achieved fame as an artist and illustrator, known principally for his drawings of cats and the famous Louis wain Annuals. He died in an asylum in1939. Jane Coles has taken the strange and claustraphobic atmosphere of the Wains' Westgate on Sea household as the starting point for a play that explores with humour and compassion the finely drawn line between imagination and madness, fantasy and nightmare. Jane Coles has often written for radio, but this is her first stage play.