"Things don't change no matter how much you want them to. You try, you run away, you make things new but they're not. Same old shit covered in lipstick." Maud, a woman on the run from damage buried in her past, has sheltered Cynthia from the wildness of the world for the last few years. Cynthia loves Maud, and Maud loves Cynthia, but now she's starting to suffocate. When she meets Dennis, a security guard at the office where she works, she thinks for a moment that she's glimpsed an escape. While Cynthia, the nocturnal recluse, sleeps, clinging to YouTube videos of Shirley Bassey, their dressing up box and McDonald's, Maud is preparing for the greatest performance of her life, and it's only a matter of time before reality seeps in and shatters their cocoon of lipstick and fairytales. Annie Jenkins' savage, funny, deeply loving debut gives a heartfelt voice to the fractured life of the modern city. A play about sex, lies, damage, and the ceilings on our dreams from a writer who shows us both how powerful and how powerless it feels to be young, and trying to dream a future into being. In Lipstick is a major new production at the Pleasance, from the multi-award winning theatre company Up In Arms, whose 'heartbreaking' (New York Times) productions have been acclaimed for "capturing the still, sad music of humanity" (Michael Billington, The Guardian). Director Alice Hamilton's compassionate stagings of the work of David Storey and Robert Holman have earned her a reputation as one of the most intelligent and empathetic theatremakers of her generation. The second new writer from Up In Arms, the theatre company whose award-winning productions of Barney Norris's plays have received national and international acclaim. Booking Period: 8 - 27 January 2019 Running Time: 90 minutes (no interval) Age Restrictions: 12+ Venue: Pleasance Theatre, Carpenters Mews, North Road, London N7 9EF