Prince in Love: A Comedy in Five Acts - Softcover

Chu, George

9798194933136: Prince in Love: A Comedy in Five Acts

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798194933136

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

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A comedy in five acts, in rhymed couplets

Prince Roman has been photographed since he could walk. He has been described in print every week of his adult life, so generously and so often that he no longer believes any account of himself, including the true ones. He wants one ordinary Tuesday, unscheduled and unphotographed, in a room where somebody contradicts him.

Lady Joliet Montagu has spent nine years at the law and is very good at it, and would like, once, to be the line above a photograph instead of the line beneath one. Their two houses have been suing each other for nineteen years over three yards of lawn.

They meet at a masked ball, before either knows the other's name, and have twenty minutes of telling the truth. Everything after that is other people: a press secretary who is very funny for three acts and is then broken for the one thing he did not do; a newspaperman who never lies and cannot be argued down; a cousin who fixes seven things and is thanked once, and who at the last will not take another errand without terms; and a king who has been frightened of a Sunday paper since 1994 and has organised a reign around it.

What the play turns on, in the end, is the price of nine plain words. I was afraid, and I was wrong. Three men decline to say them. It takes two women to get them said.

About this edition

Six full-page plates, drawn for this edition in the manner of a line engraving — one object to an act, each of them physically present in the act it faces.
Written throughout in rhymed couplets — pairs of ten-syllable lines — with a note in the front matter on the two conventions a reader will meet on the page.
Five acts, thirty scenes, nine speaking parts. Approximately two hours ten minutes in performance, with one interval at the end of Act Three.

For directors and drama departments

Cast: eight principals — three women, five men — plus a photographer with two lines, castable either way and easily doubled. The play does not double beyond that: all eight principals are on stage together twice.
Set: one platform and six chairs. Every location in the play can be the same platform changed by light and by what people are carrying. Nothing in this play needs to be built. The balcony can be a chair.
Content: no violence, no sex, no strong language. Suitable for school and college production.
Rights: amateur and educational performance rights are granted freely to schools, universities and community theatre companies, with no royalty payable, on the single condition that the author is credited in the programme. Professional and broadcast rights are reserved.

Also by George Chu: The Golden Prince — a comedy in five acts. The Merchant of Manhattan — a comedy in five acts. The Quant Billionaire — ten algorithms and the arithmetic of a firm.

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