Mary O'Malley
Look Out...Here Comes Trouble

The play is set in a London psychiatric hospital. The ‘trouble’ comes in the shape of Dr Wilson, the psychiatrist, who maintains an uneasy and tenuous relationship with his patients, unable to offer little more than Valium or Mogadon to solve their problems of social inadequacy and unfulfilled ambitions. Here we see Mary O’Malley’s great talent for delineating a group of individuals locked together within an institutional structure that cannot accommodate their idiosyncrasies, minor obsessions and petty foibles. (Cast 8m, 6f)

“...a truly individual piece of work that is compassionate, funny, tender, unpreachy and quick-witted.”
~ Michael Billington, The Guardian

“The play early makes its point, that the abnormal are people only a fraction less able to cope than ourselves.”
~ John Barber, Daily Telegraph

“Miss O’Malley has seen clean into the soul of human frustration.”
~ Jack Tinker, Daily Mail

Mary O'Malley
Once a Catholic

This highly successful comedy is a sharply critical exposition of a Catholic girlhood in a London convent school in the late 1950s, with its potent admixture of sex and religion.
(Cast 4m, 10+f)

“...a marvellously irreverent, affectionate and funny play about the confusions and contradictions and general awfulness of being a Catholic schoolgirl in postwar England ... O’Malley’s ear for dialogue is immaculate...”
~ Sheridan Morley, Herald Tribune

“This engaging and at times outrageously funny comedy ... is a play that combines its humour with real humanity, and at the end I offered a heartfelt prayer of thanks that I’d been spared a Catholic convent education.”
~ Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

“The play works like the ceremonial incense: one sniff of that overpowering sweet scent and you’re on a spiritual high so orgasmic, you can almost see St Peter at the heavenly gates.”
~ Catherine Itzin, Tribune