A Mad World My Masters

It really surprised me, a few weeks ago, when I noticed that the RSC was on tour and visiting Blackpool with a production of Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters. I booked tickets immediately and the more I thought about the forthcoming performance, the more appropriate Blackpool seemed as a venue for the play!

A Mad World My Masters is a city comedy of the Jacobean era and Middleton, just like so many Blackpool businesses, knew that sex sells. He filled his plays with bawdy, comical and sometimes nasty sexual encounters, writing about a world driven by money, politics and sex.

We arrived in wacky, tacky Blackpool where the Grand Theatre sits cheek by jowl with Funny Girls and Blackpool Tower and, after a pizza where the floor show was almost as good as the play to come, we entered the world of Middleton's bawdy city satire.

The RSC had set the play in 1950s Soho where pimps and prostitutes rub shoulders with lords and vicars. The 1950s setting was so appropriate and the addition of jazz club style music was fantastic.

Overall, it was a wonderful performance and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.




A bawdy romp of not-so-subtle sexual jokes, Middleton explores a world in which characters lust after sex and money, and dysfunctional families bicker and scheme. Maybe he'd been to Blackpool, too!