As ever, our season is full of contrasts of themes, styles and characters, not to mention location - both geographically and through time. We started with two pieces that could not have been more different : 'Oleanna' is a modern two-handed play set in a university office, whereas 'Romeo and Juliet' offers us a sumptuous view of Verona with a cast of dozens. 'Picasso' is a play set in 1904 Paris (though written much later) taking in love and genius and the Chekhov classis 'Uncle Vanya' takes us to a sleepy Russian village in the middle of a long hot summer. The last two plays of the season are both set in the present day, but still the differences are more striking (at first glance at least) than the similarities. In 'Shakers' we meet four women working in a cocktail bar coping with the stresses of their day to day lives; Stoppard's 'The Real Thing' is a more 'wordy' piece but both are carefully crafted linguistically and Stoppard's characters are struggling with their ordinary relationships too, so perhaps they have more in common that it would at first seem.