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A WORD FROM THE PRODUCER...
July 2025
What an amazing two years we have had! In March 2024 we performed Reza De Wet's haunting and thought provoking play, Missing, at the Southern Counties Drama Festival in Oxted. Then in May we were privileged to stage the European premiere of Midsummer, a new, fast paced, whacky adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I saw at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and immediately fell in love with. The American production company who created it, Tiltyard, have never licenced their work to any other company but were so taken with our plans for the show that they immediately let us have the rights! We performed the show in the gardens of The Archbishop's Palace in Otford to huge acclaim and even bigger audiences. Tiltyard wrote to us afterwards saying that they were so impressed with what we had done and how in tune we were with their original idea that they completely waived our fee for the rights! High praise indeed!
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In the summer we were back at our usual venues of The White Rock Inn, Underriver and St Briavels Castle, Gloucestershire with our main summer production of As You Like It. Whilst the weather was a little disappointing (the last matinee in Underriver had to be transferred to the village hall due to the inclement weather!) the show still had great audiences and was loved by all who saw it.
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Following the success of our 2024 season we decided that we could do so much more as a company and have hatched some fantastic plans for the future. To get ourselves ready for even bigger and better events we decided to concentrate on just the one show, Much Ado About Nothing, in 2025 so we could prepare ourselves properly for future years.
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Much Ado About Nothing was another huge success, attracting our biggest audience numbers since The Compleat Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) in 2021! Set in modern Italy after the Italian victory in the Euros this was an imaginative, bright and loud version of one of Shakespeare's most loved plays. With comedy, drama, hen/stag dos and finishing with a double wedding and party this show had the audiences dancing in the aisles. Literally! Interestingly our last matinee in Underriver had to be transferred again to the Village Hall due to inclement weather! Let's hope that doesn't become a perennial theme!​​​​
And so we now spend the late summer, autumn and winter of 2025 and early 2026 preparing for our 2026 season. We will kick off with our own adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, which we have entitled Shrewed. This will be similar in style to Midsummer and will again take place at The Archbishop's Palace in Otford in May. Reset in 1940s England with the ladies being part of the Land Army we will be turning the story on it's head making it much more relevant and it's message more acceptable to a modern audience.
Our summer show will be Othello. Performed again at our normal summer venues of The White Rock Inn and St Briavels Castle we are, again, working on making this play exciting and fresh for a modern audience. We are also negotiating with another venue for this show to transfer to in addition to our traditional venues and we shall let you know when the negotiations are finalised.
Looking even further ahead, in 2027 we shall be back at the Southern Counties Drama Festival with Outrageous Fortune which tells the story of two of Shakespeare's most tragic female characters, Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, as they meet in the afterlife. Our main summer show will be The Merry Wives of Windsor. I don't want to give too much away but we are working on something pretty special for that too!
We are also expanding our Pop-Up Shakespeare events with our next one scheduled for October and more on the way.
As for 2028? Well, we already have some great ideas for that season too so keep visiting the website for further updates!
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Steve