Quiz Show

Everyone's favourite Quizmaster, Daniel Caplin, gives tonight's gifted contestants the chance to play for the ultimate prize - to discover what lies behind the Door of Truth. Newcomer Sandra has always been desperate to find out and she's more than a threat to our reigning champion. Read more …

But the lights are burning, there are beads of sweat forming and the audience have stopped laughing. None of this is right.

Rob Drummond's Quiz Show is an urgent and timely response to our celebrity-obsessed world.

Directed by the Traverse's Associate Director, Hamish Pirie, whose recent work includes, Mark Thomas: Bravo Figaro! and Oliver Award-nominated Salt, Root and Roe by Tim Price.

The critical consensus

The uncertainty felt by contestant Sandra, superbly acted by Eileen Walsh, is the same uncertainty we have trying to trust this slippery play. It leaves us uneasy and haunted.

(*) Mark Fisher, The Guardian, 03/04/2013

Complicated but ultimately gripping.

(*) David Pollock, The Independent, 04/04/2013

Of all the questions posed by acclaimed Scottish dramatist Rob Drummond’s latest play Quiz Show, perhaps the most unanswerable is why, in the midst of its 50th anniversary celebrations, Scotland’s new writing theatre, the Traverse, is staging such a terrible piece of work.

(*) (*) (*) Mark Brown, The Telegraph, 04/04/2013

Although the play occasionally seems almost too bold in its shape-shifting to hold together, it is thrilling to see a first full-length play which works so relentlessly and brilliantly on the consciousness of the audience, taking us on a journey – into the immediate past of our society, and its possible futures – from which we cannot return unchanged.

(*) Joyce McMillan, 04/04/2013

Powerful and spellbinding.

Thom Dibdin, The Stage, 04/04/2013

A gripping, surreal, essential drama.

Alan Chadwick, STV, 05/04/2013

This is a tense, arresting, thought-provoking top-of-the-range theatre. An absolute prize of a show.

Irene Brown, Annals of Edinburgh Stage, 04/04/2013

The cast is excellent, the staging and direction exciting and pacey, all working to bring Bullet Catch creator Rob Drummond’s script vividly to life.

(*) The Scotsman, 12/04/2013

Thunderingly powerful stuff, which reverberates long after seeing it, and in which every single word counts. This is the sort of dangerous, questioning and beautifully-delivered theatre that the Traverse was made to stage.

Thom Dibdin, The List, 17/04/2013

The journey undergone by the protagonist is riveting, full of emotion, and accentuated by an energetic and colourful cast. Drummond's script addresses a whole different kind of corruption to Robert Redford's 1994 film by the same name and reaches further than the commercial model it is based on to speak about society's complicity in violence.

(*) Celia Dugua, The Journal, 20/04/2013

Drummond’s blistering play is a much needed and pertinent comment on the misplaced idolisation of the entertainment industry.

Callum Madge, TVBomb, 21/04/2013