Wicked Bodies perform My Little Fox
Work Bard Play Bard is over!
Big thanks to everyone involved. Special shout out to IdeasTap, who supported the night, and The Pleasance, who were insanely helpful even with 50 of us running around trying to take over the building.
If you didn’t make it, we’ll be uploading some video soon, and you can check out the lineup here. If you were there, please take 90 seconds to fill in our feedback form – it’ll really help us in the future.
The night was a huge success. We sold over 170 tickets (the venue holds 180…), and had more than 50 artists involved, across 18 different companies. There were too many highlights to name! Special thanks to our guest companies: The Merely Players, The Handlebards, Invertigo, Wicked Bodies, and the extraordinary Tony Bell.
Damn’d Spot performing ‘The Tragedie of Lady Macbeth’
We’re also incredibly pleased with the response to the 12 winners of our IdeasTap competition. These guys all applied and auditioned to be part of the night. We tried to choose a mix of established groups and unknown quantities, to give people a chance to prove themselves they may not otherwise have had. So we’re dead chuffed they all turned out so great! Big congratulations to Zut Alors, Damn’d Spot, Le Mot Juste, Eunoia, Footfall, The Rose Company, So There’s That, Matt & Sydney, Emma Bentley, Kate Goodfellow, Alex Marlow and Sarah Milton.
Zut Alors perform Twelfth Night in the bar
As well as a stellar lineup on the stage, we had the wonderful Zut Alors perform two extracts from Twelfth Night in the bar, and a scene from Othello by So There’s That playing on loop in the Ladies (sorry chaps). Plus, you may have missed The Merely Players‘ side-splitting rendition of the Midsummer Night’s Dream Mechanicals scene during the interval (with a little help from the audience), and Wicked Bodies snuck a few small audiences onto the theatre stage after the show to perform an intimate scene based on Macbeth‘s witches (which premiered as part of RIFT’s smash-hit Macbeth, earlier this year).
Our own team appeared four times over the night, with extracts from Romeo & Juliet and Titus Andronicus. Plus, we invited Merely Players co-founder Scott Ellis to guest direct us in Henry V, and performed a scratch from Much Ado About Nothing – a show we’re strongly considering for our next production. You can see the credits for our extracts here.
The night went so well we’re already in talks for the next one. In future they’ll be a little shorter – now we know it’s regular we don’t have to cram so much in! – and we’re hoping to bring in guest hosts each time, to curate a different lineup. To stay in the loop, follow us on Facebook, or join our Mailing List.
Finally, two very special thank yous: Rianna Dearden (from Lost Watch), who helped produce the night and kept us sane, and Celia Dugua, our own associate lighting designer, who tech-managed the whole thing on just a bottle of sparkling water and half a sandwich.
If you see either of them, buy them a drink. They sure earned them.
