Mr Thrushby’s Adventure comes to Greenwich Theatre for rehearsed reading
Esme Waters’ five-star-reviewed wartime crime caper returns to London for a one-off script-in-hand performance at Greenwich Theatre Studio on Tuesday 28 July 2026.
Esme Waters’ period crime caper Mr Thrushby’s Adventure is coming to Greenwich Theatre Studio on Tuesday 28 July as part of the theatre’s See NEW Next Tuesday programme.
Set in Sunningdale in January 1940, the full-length play introduces Mr Thrushby, a retired bachelor whose carefully ordered existence has become both a refuge and a source of quiet despair. He has spent years experiencing excitement second-hand through his radio, collecting ornaments and dreaming of adventures he never quite managed to have.
That changes abruptly when Sam Carlton, a charming young criminal fleeing an audacious gold-bullion robbery, bursts into his home. Rather than immediately rejecting the intruder, Mr Thrushby finds himself fascinated by him — and increasingly entangled in a situation far beyond anything his former routine prepared him for.
What begins as an unlikely encounter develops into a combination of period crime story, drawing-room farce and late-life awakening. Social niceties collide with mounting danger as visitors arrive, explanations become harder to sustain and Mr Thrushby discovers that adventure may not have passed him by after all.
From Mexico to Greenwich
The Greenwich appearance continues a development journey that has already taken Mr Thrushby’s Adventure to audiences in Britain and overseas.
The play received a staged reading from The Bravo! Theatre in Mexico in April 2025, while an extract was presented at the Asylum Players Scratch Night in Lincoln during the same month. It was subsequently read in New York as part of the 2025 Hudson Valley Theatre Festival and selected among the Top 40 for Centre Stage’s 23rd Annual New Play Festival.
A new company for Greenwich
Waters will direct her own play for its Greenwich presentation, with a company combining performers familiar with the work and actors joining it in new roles.
Jonathan Hansler returns as Mr Thrushby, having previously played the part at both Theatre Royal Windsor and Playhouse East. Arthur Campbell takes the role of Sam Carlton.
The company is completed by Stephanie Cranston as Felicity, Duncan Hess as former Scotland Yard detective Adam Dunford, Steevan Glover as Doctor Rothington, Chris Moyes as Colonel Buckingham-Wentworth and Christie Silvester as Mrs Rowley.
The script-in-hand presentation will be rehearsed during the day before being performed that evening. The format places the emphasis firmly on the writing and performances, allowing audiences to experience how a new play develops while leaving room for the physical possibilities of a future fully staged production.
With only one Greenwich performance scheduled, the reading offers another opportunity to encounter a warmly comic adventure that has continued to gather momentum on both sides of the Atlantic.
at Theatre Royal Windsor, January 2026. Photographs: Robert Cope.
Greenwhich Performance information
- Showing: Tuesday 28th July 2026
- Venue: Greenwich Theatre Studio, Crooms Hill, London, SE10 8ES
- Buy Tickets: https://greenwichtheatre.org.uk/book/?event=293601
- Writer & Director: Esme Waters
- Producer: Esme Waters
- Photography from Windsor production: Robert Cope
- Cast:
Arthur Campbell as Sam Carlton
Stephanie Cranston as Felicity
Duncan Hess as Adam Dunford
Steevan Glover as Doctor Rothington
Chris Moyes as Colonel Buckingham-Wentworth
Christie Silvester as Mrs Rowley
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