The White Liars

About the show

The White Liars is a one-act play by Peter Shaffer, first performed in 1967 and originally titled White Lies. It is often performed with another of Shaffer's one-act plays, Black Comedy, to form the double-bill of The White Liars and Black Comedy. The White Liars revolves around Sophie Lemberg, an eccentric and disillusioned fortune teller (who imagines herself to be a baroness of the Holy Roman Empire) living in a decaying seaside resort, and the two young men—Tom, the lead singer in a rock band, and Frank, his business manager—who consult her. It soon becomes clear that their lives are much stranger than the fiction Sophie tries to create in her magic ball.