Few tickets remain for Dig In For Murder

by Site Admin on Friday, November 30, 2007
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STAC productions

The STAC website has it on good authority that next week’s Dig In For Murder at the Swan studio is almost sold out. Every evening performance is full, with waiting lists building up. Some tickets remain for the preview on Monday night (which is cheaper but does not include the full buffet) and some tickets may be left for the Saturday matinee.

Dying for a good meal

by Site Admin on Friday, November 30, 2007
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Newspapers, STAC productions

The Worcester News mentions STAC’s Dig In For Murder today. The show runs next week.

Buffet murder

THE Swan Theatre Amateur Company’s annual murder mystery buffet takes place next week.

The show, in which the audience can tuck into supper, enjoy a glass of wine and try to guess who did it, is being staged in the Swan Theatre studio from Tuesday to Saturday.

For tickets, priced £15.50, call the box office on 01905 611427.

Vote for “Millions” to come to Worcester’s Cripplegate Park

by Site Admin on Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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Other local news, Worcester Live

Worcester Live is supporting (via their email list) the Cripplegate Park bid to receive a small portion of the “People’s Millions”, being given away tonight on ITV1.

From the City Council:

People’s Millions
I-Play bid goes to the public vote!!!

Please call 08702 433 302
You can call from 9am to Midnight.
Each vote from a landline costs less than 10p.
Mobile calls will be a bit more.
You are allowed 10 votes from each phoneline.

A bid to turn a small, underused area of Cripplegate park into a play and meeting space for teenagers has won through to the final round of the ‘People’s Millions Project’. The bid is for £44,558 and covers the cost of the I-Play game, an up to the minute youth shelter and contemporary setting.

I-Play is a brand new concept in play, designed to counteract the current trend in obesity and ‘couch potato’ syndrome. It is solar powered and uses computer and mobile phone technology to motivate children into activity. Participants play the physically active game and compete with themselves or others in the park, city, or county in order to complete the game in the fastest time. One of it’s strongest points is that it can be played by children in wheelchairs or those who have hearing or sight impairment.

It is a trail blazing piece of equipment and how wonderful would it be if Worcester was one of the first places to install it?

We need your vote if we are to win.

The Swan is “a genuine community resource with a balanced programme”

by Site Admin on Thursday, November 22, 2007
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Newspapers, Other local arts, STAC news, Worcester Live

STAC member, Bob Churchill, and head of Worcester Live, Chris Jaeger, independently had letters printed in the Worcester Standard last week. Both were defending the Swan Theatre against the peculiar charge that it does not cater for a wide enough range of tastes, especially family audiences.

A letter in the Worcester Standard, 9th November (note: the page online is inaccurately dated as the subsequent Friday, the 16th), had complained that “what is on offer generally at the Swan theatre these days” is too often like the recent tour, Get Naked. (This was a nude a cappella performance by a troupe of male singers, though even this was aimed more at philosophizing about attitudes to the male body than simple lude entertainment.) These shows, Joan Ritchie argued, “are not suitable for a mixed age audience. It seems a shame that a theatre that was brought about by the people, for the people now only attracts limited audiences.” (Her letter is reproduced below.)

Bob Churchill and Chris Jaeger’s responses can be found online on the Standard’s Letters page for the 16th November (or in full below). Bob talks from the perspective of his “own theatrical experience in Worcester (acting) … with the STAC”, detailing the shows STAC have performed in the last year or so, many of which were suitable for a wide range of audiences. And he also mentions the STAC Children’s Theatre shows: “they are very popular, and, I’m proud to say, they cost just £1.50 a ticket. If that’s not inclusive I don’t know what is!”

Meanwhile Chris gave a similar rundown of shows from the broader perspective of the whole theatre, concluding that the Swan “is a genuine community resource with a balanced programme, If you choose not to come, that is your prerogative, but please don’t pretend that there is nothing here for mixed audiences. There is something here for everybody.”

All three letters are reproduced in full below.

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Digging it! Angela’s play is selling quickly

by Site Admin on Friday, November 16, 2007
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Personal, STAC productions

Tickets for STAC’s fifth annual murder mystery, Dig In For Murder by Angela Lanyon, have already sold out for the Saturday night performance.

As well as penning various STAC productions, including many staples of the Children’s Theatre repertoire, Dig In For Murder’s writer/director Angela Lanyon also writes articles for magazines and has had work broadcast on Radio 4. She worked in professional theatre management for twenty years, including the Chichester Festival Theatre.

My last job was at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth where amongst other things I directed Out In The Midday Sun, a narrative of Noel Coward the traveller in the Studio Theatre. I also wrote and administered Theatre to Schools when I was working in Essex.

On her motivation for writing, Lanyon jokingly quotes Samuel Johnson — “No one but a fool ever wrote for anything other than money”. But she adds:

I do like to see people having a good time, a laugh and set them a puzzle. So far they have always been solved but usually only one person has come up with the right answer per performance. Will this year be different?

Dig In For Murder is showing from Tuesday 4th to Saturday 8th December at 7.30pm in the Swan Studio, with a special preview on Monday 3rd at 7.30pm, and a matinee on Saturday 8th at 2.30pm.

The last, lost Ayckbourn comedy rediscovered

by Site Admin on Friday, November 2, 2007
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National, Newspapers

Someone must be doing a thorough search through the British Library! Only this summer came news of the discovery of a long lost Noel Coward play (the Swan Theatre Amateur Company will be performing another Noel Coward comedy, Private Lives, in February). And now — only weeks after STAC’s production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Relatively Speaking — an early Ayckbourn thought lost forever has been rediscovered in the national archives. Love After All was the popular playwright’s second ever script.

The Guardian reports:

The only gap in the canon of works by Britain’s most successful living playwright, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, has been filled by the discovery of a play which was thought to have been destroyed nearly half a century ago.

Briefly staged in 1959 at Scarborough, the writer’s long-standing base, the comedy Love After All was never performed again and even at the time consisted of only a handful of typed scripts for actors and stage staff.

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Audition Notice: The Blue Room

by Site Admin on Thursday, November 1, 2007
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Auditions, STAC productions

Open Auditions for The Blue Room
by David Hare
to be directed by Chris Jaeger

Auditioning Tue 13th November 2007 — 7.30pm
at the Swan Theatre (SAMA room), Worcester

Showing Tue 29th April — Sat 3rd May 2008
at the Swan Theatre, Worcester

The audition pieces will be page 20-22 of the Faber edition (Scene 4, The Student and the Married Woman) and 43-46 (Scene 6, The Married Woman and the Politician).

Cast: 1 female, 1 male

• Female: various characters of varying ages from early adulthood to late middle-age; The Girl, The Au Pair, The Married Woman, The Model, The Actress
• Male: various characters of varying ages from early adulthood to late middle-age; The Cab Driver, The Student, The Politician, The Playwright, The Aristocrat

Please note: Extensive nude work is required and simulated sex acts are performed by both actors.

Backstage crew will also be required.

The play: The Blue Room is a loose interpretation of a play called La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler (which itself was originally called Reigen) written in 1900. La Ronde was not premiered until 1921 in Vienna, when it was immediately closed down by the police. It also opened in Berlin in the same year, and was also closed, this time resulting in the trial of the 6 actors on obscenity charges. It was made into a film in 1950, and has become something of a cult classic.

David Hare has brought the play more or less up-to-date, and has written it for a cast of two (1 male and 1 female). There are ten scenes, and each actor plays the same character twice before changing to be someone else. The play is a bleak commentary on loveless sex, and a fairly depressing reflection on human nature at its most basic level.

Notes from the director:

I am intending to use live music (jazz trio) and a set of projected photos to represent the various placing of the scenes. It will be a real test for the cast, who have a series of rapid costume changes as well as some extensive changes of character with ages ranging from 18 – 50 for both sexes.

In addition, they will be required to do extensive nude work, both frontal and rear (although not at the audition!) and some scenes of simulated sex acts. There is strong language in the play.

Please ring me for a chat if you are thinking of auditioning, on 01905 727971 (day) or 07831 588780 (anytime).

Links:

• The Blue Room on Wikipedia
• See Who are STAC? for company information and a map to the theatre
• Google map of Bygones Antique shop, Worcester from where scripts can be borrowed
• Please make contact via the STAC website if you have any other queries