BOLTON playwright Neil Duffield has written a Christmas entertainment especially for the Octagon.

Stripy Tales is aimed at three to eight-year-olds and is a mixture of stories and folk tales.

All the trickiest, naughtiest animals in the forest will be featured and there will be songs, music and dancing. The show runs from December 5 to January 11.

The Octagon's autumn season starts with Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa, (September? 12 to October 5) a portrait of a family of five single Irish women, set in the closing days of the long, hot summer of 1936. As they struggle to keep their home together, their lives are revitalised by lively, swirling and breathtaking music and dancing in their Donegal Home. By the end of the Harvest Festival of Lughnasa, the sisters' lives are transformed forever.

This play was first performed at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990 and transferred to the West End for a successful run. It won the 1990 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.

Alan Bennett's Enjoy follows (October 10 to November 2). Wilf and Connie Craven are assigned a council observer who silently records the details of their lives as a street of back to back houses is dismantled around them.

Following Victoria Wood's sell-out national tour, audiences will have the chance to see her hilarious play Talent from November 7 to 30. Talent is 80 minutes of songs, music and comedy. Philip Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney ends the season from January 16 to February 8. The play immediately achieved cult status when it was performed in 1991 and is one of the most performed new English plays of recent years. The sinister Cosmo invades the lives of chocoholic twins Presley and Hayley and the play twists into nightmarish terror.

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