SIDMOUTH’s Manor Pavilion theatre hosts its annual summer season of plays in repertory from Monday 23rd June to mid-September. The season, at the seaside town’s Manor Pavilion theatre, is now said to be the longest running continuous summer rep in the country.

Over 12 weeks, local theatre-goers and holiday-makers are entertained with a programme of popular comedies, thrillers and some classic drama to satisfy every theatrical taste.

The season gets off to a chilling start with A Touch of Danger, a twisting tale of betrayal, murder and mistaken identity by Francis Durbridge. Like all the plays in the season, it runs to Saturday at 8pm each evening.

On 30th June, there is a popular farce, Don’t Dress for Dinner by Marc Camoletti (of Boeing Boeing fame), followed on 7th July, by Ronald Harwood’s warm and lovely play Quartet, set in a rest home for retired singers – it was successfully filmed by a cast including the late Dame Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins and Billy Connolly.

Alan Ayckbourn’s typically acerbic but laugh-out-loud comedy Time and Time Again is on for the week beginning 14th July, followed by another comedy, Richard Harris’s A Foot in the Door, from 21st July.

A sharp-witted comedy with a dark underside, Tim Firth’s Neville’s Island is on from 28th July, with Frederick Knott’s classic murder mystery Dial M for Murder, from 11th August, and a period piece, Philip King’s farce See How They Run, from 18th.

With a week out for Sidmouth Folk Festival, the rep season resumes on 25th August, with Torben Betts’s psychological thriller Murder in the Dark.

The three September plays are Noel Coward’s delightful A Song at Twilight, from Monday 1st, Sandy Rustin’s The Cottage, a cheeky homage to Noel Coward, from 8th September, and the season ends with Ken Ludwig’s adaptation of one of the all-time great chillers, Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, from 15th September.