Laughter is the best medicine.

Argan is a perfectly healthy, wealthy gentleman, convinced that he is seriously ill. So obsessed is he with medicinal tinkerings and tonics that he is blind to the goings on in his own household. However, his most efficacious cure will not appear in a bottle or a bedpan, but in his sharp tongued servant, who has a cunning plan to reveal the truth and open her master’s eyes.

Following last year’s hysterical and critically acclaimed Tartuffe, Liverpool’s Poet Laureate, Roger McGough, dips his magic quill again by adapting another classic Molière comedy. This time he turns prose into verse with a witty laughter tonic. The Hypochondriac was Molière’s last play and a scathingly funny lampoon on both hypochondria and the ‘quack’ medical profession.

A co-production with English Touring Theatre, The Hypochondriac will tour the UK in Autumn 2009.