SLT Audition
Auditions: Wanderlust
By Nick Payne
Audition one
Date: 7 Dec 2025
Time: 10:00 - 12:00
Location: SLT Fire Station SE27 9NS
Audition two
Date: 8 Dec 2025
Time: 20:00 - 22:00
Location: SLT Fire Station SE27 9NS
A brutally funny, squirm-inducing comedy about sex, marriage, and the messiness of intimacy.
Joy and Alan Richards have been married for decades, but it's been a year since they've had sex. Joy, a GP, is drowning in the demands of work and family life. Alan, an English teacher, is frustrated and increasingly desperate. Their careful politeness around each other is cracking at the seams.
When Stephen Moore - Joy's old flame from university - walks into her surgery with an embarrassing medical complaint, he sparks something Joy thought had disappeared: desire, possibility, the memory of who she used to be. Meanwhile, Alan finds himself drawn to Clare, a young teacher at his school, leading to a confession that will force both Joy and Alan to confront what they really want from each other.
At the same time, their fifteen-year-old son Tim is navigating his own sexual anxieties. Terrified of humiliating himself with his school crush, he asks his friend Michelle for help "practicing."
Nick Payne's wickedly funny play cuts between doctor's surgeries, school offices, bedrooms, and restaurants, watching these parallel stories of desire, disappointment, and tentative hope unfold simultaneously. Wanderlust finds explosive comedy in our most intimate failures and asks whether love is enough when the passion has gone.
Raw, honest, and hilarious, this is a play about what happens when we stop pretending everything is fine.
Please note: This production contains explicit sexual content, adult themes, strong language, and scenes of physical intimacy throughout. Recommended for audiences 16+.
Director: Owen Thomas James
Performances: 7 - 11 Apr 2026
First Rehearsal: 25 Jan 2026
Characters:
Joy Richards: Playing age 40-50s, female. A GP and mother who, after 25 years of marriage, finds herself quietly suffocating in routine and struggling with sexual frustration and emotional distance in her marriage. Joy wrestles with guilt, desire, and the fear that her body - and her life - are closing in on her. The play’s emotional centre. A role of quiet complexity - wry humour under tension, showing the ache of unspoken longing.
Alan Richards: Playing age 40-50s, male. Joy’s husband, an English teacher and head of department. A self-absorbed, emotionally clumsy man, he feels emasculated by the lack of intimacy in his marriage and seeks validation through an affair. Pedantic, anxious, and occasionally pompous, he uses intellect to hide vulnerability. A man caught between moral self-image and private desire.
Tim Richards: Playing age 15, male (Please note the actor should be over 18). Joy and Alan’s only child: teenager-y, hormone-drenched, and desperate to appear worldly. Tim’s first serious relationship catapults him into a crash course in sex, love, and embarrassment. Sweet-natured but prone to foot-in-mouth disasters, he is the play’s heartbeat of innocence and confusion. Needs natural teenage awkwardness, wide-eyed sincerity, and the ability to shift from bravado to terror in a heartbeat.
Michelle McCullen: Playing age 15, female (Please note the actor should be over 18). Tim’s classmate and friend. Intelligent, bold, and sexually active, but still very much navigating adapting to adulthood. She alternates between control and uncertainty. Her relationship with Tim is central to the play’s exploration of intimacy, consent, and youthful experimentation.
Stephen Moore: Playing age 40-50s, male. An old school friend of Joy’s. Recently bereaved, sexually insecure. His awkward persistence is both comic and heartbreaking - a man who mistakes availability for destiny. Initially comic, ultimately tragic – he is a portrait of loneliness and misplaced yearning.
Clare Walsh: Playing age 20-30s, female. Alan’s younger colleague in the English department. She is flirtatious, irreverent, and confident. Her affair with Alan is impulsive rather than malicious, driven by boredom and a desire for attention. Needs strong comic timing and nuance to reveal the emptiness beneath her teasing wit.
Neil Waters*: Playing age 50s, male (*doubles with the role of Waiter). Head of IT at Alan’s school. Isolated, pitifully comic, and quietly unravelling after the collapse of his marriage. Caught masturbating at work and later found dishevelled and rambling about Amsterdam, Neil embodies the play’s darker absurdities around shame, desire, and loneliness.
Waiter*: (as above, doubles with the role of Neil) A single-scene role: he is polite, professional and unintentionally intrusive in Alan and Joy’s public breakdown. Can show deadpan comic restraint.
Note: All roles require comfort with frank sexual dialogue, partial nudity (non-gratuitous), and emotional intimacy. Intimacy coordination will be provided. Actors will audition in pairs as every audition side is a duologue. You may be asked to read multiple times as we test out different combinations of actors. Audition slots: The first hour of each audition day will be for Joy & Alan only, all other characters will be seen after this.
Audition sides can be obtained here
COMPLETE THIS FORM to book an audition slot. Please only email the director if you need further information, not to apply for an audition.
