ONE of the cornerstones of the Old Laundry's autumn season is the annual visit of the talent performers from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, staged on three consecutive days from Thursday, October 18.

LAMDA's first production is Patrick Marber's Three Days in the Country, adapted from A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev. The play is set on a beautiful country estate in the mid-19th Century where a handsome new tutor brings reckless, romantic desire to an eccentric household. Over three days one summer the young and the old will learn lessons in love: first love and forbidden love, maternal love and platonic love, love left unsaid and the love which must out.

On the Friday, Martin Crimp's The Treatment transforms the Old Laundry into the offices of a New York film studio where a young woman has an urgent story to tell. But as both a once-famous playwright adds his own spin and a movie star joins the project, it becomes increasingly apparent that in this world people are products, movies are money and sex sells. The darkly comic satire - which premiered at the Royal Court in 1993 - examines the media’s distortion of reality, and the ways people build their own fictions to block out the world around them.

Noel Coward's wickedly witty, dark romantic comedy, Design for Living, is in the spotlight on the Saturday (October 20), zipping from 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, focusing on a tempestuous love triangle that unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto.

All performances are 2.30pm and 7.30pm.

Next in the Bowness theatre's autumn programme is Esk Valley Theatre Company performing Bill Manhoff's classic American comedy The Owl and The Pussycat on Friday and Saturday, October 26/27.

Joking Apart and Better Off Dead are Stephen Joseph Theatre's contribution to the Old Laundry's 2018 season.

Once more, written and directed by the master himself, Alan Ayckbourn, the must-see shows play on alternate dates between Wednesday, October 31 and Saturday, November 10.

November's line-up features award-winning Box Tale Soup's version of Oscar Wilde's haunting story of evil, debauchery and scandal, A Picture of Dorian Grey, on Thursday, November 15 (7.30pm) with puppetry and a powerful original soundtrack.

Dyad Productions stage a radical new interpretation of the HG Wells classic The Time Machine on Friday, November 16 (7.30pm) and

and the red hot rhythms of the breathtaking Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers: Tribe provide sumptuous soundscapes on Sunday, November 18 (7.30pm) and Skerryvore's feelgood fusion of folk rock will reverberate around the Bowness theatre on Tuesday, November 20 (7.30pm).

Also among the theatre's November treats will be some of the hottest contemporary fiddle players around. Blazin' Fiddles' Jenna Reid, Bruce MacGregor, Rua Macmillan and Kristan Harvey are joined by Anna Massie on guitar and fiddle and pianist, Angus Lyon, delivering a musically intoxicating evening on Friday, November 30 (7.30pm).

Onwards to December 21-22, and A Christmas Carol is the Old Laundry's festive offering.

Box office 015394-40872 or book online at www.oldlaundrytheatre.co.uk.