Plays for YOUR Theatre Group

On this site you will find over 30 tried and trusted stage plays by award-winning playwright Ian Hornby, who has been writing for over 20 years and whose plays have been staged and performed all over the World, from places as far apart as the USA, Greece, Cayman Islands, Holland, Japan, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Brunei (and, of course the UK) and some have even been translated into German, Japanese and Turkish.

Navigating this site

Click on a button (see left) to be taken to a page for that category. There you'll find a whole variety of plays ready for YOUR production.

For each play there are some notes about the play and a synopsis.

Remember that - on request - evaluation copies of the plays can be sent to you in pdf format by email FREE of any charges or obligation. Just email me the titles you would like to read.

For my murder games, here's a chance to raise funds for your group doing what you love - acting! Forget coffee mornings and cheese-and-wine events, treat yourself and your audience to a couple of hours of entertainment and non-stop fun. I can provide the scripts and all evidence documentation and, in most cases, tailor these to suit your group and event. If you have a special theme in mind, contact me and we can see if one can be devised to suit.

About the Author

Brilliant, creative, entertaining - three words I'd love to have applied to me.

What can I tell you? I started writing plays in my early 40s and still love to write them today, in between trying to write more novels and TV/radio scripts and being a drama adjudicator for The Greater Manchester Drama Federation. Oh, and I'm 2010 chairman of The Bridgewater Players Dramatic Society. And I run The Playwrights' Co-operative. Most recently I'm involved with Dying 4 Dinner - I write, along with my lovely wife Alison, murder mystery scripts, which we act out with a group of close friends at various venues, usually around the North West of England - call us for a quote! They're fascinating and lively fun, and are a good way of raising funds for the drama group, doing what we all love to do - act!

When people were foolish enough to actually employ me and pay me a salary, I used to design computers for a living: high-tech electronics and a job I loved. When my favourite employers, Ferranti Computer Systems, went bust, I moved to Unilever Research for 6 years and then to a couple of small electronics companies before going freelance, training people to use computers, interleaving my love of writing.

I have a full length crime thriller waiting for some imaginative publisher to snap up. It's called "Time To Kill", but you'll have to read it to find out why.

My favourite ever plays? Easy. Noises Off by Michael Frayn and The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.

My favourite writer? Again easy, though perhaps a surprise: Mary-Chapin Carpenter, a singer/songwriter who can craft words in ways I can only envy.