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Pride of Place Theatre Festival
March 30 - April 2, 2006
Ipswich and Woodbridge, Suffolk
Dateline: 22nd February, 2006
"Theatre" is a fundamental human need, while "theatres"
and their forms and styles are only temporary and replaceable boxes.
Peter Brook's crisp differentiation between place and activity is an
appropriate motto for this year's Pride of Place festival, to be hosted
by Suffolk's Eastern Angles Theatre Company.
Eastern Angles, who have been taking their productions around the barns
and halls of East Anglia for many years, exemplify Brook's credo that
it's what you do that matters. In 1998, with eleven other rural touring
companies, they formed a consortium to share, discuss and promote their
work and these biennial festivals, of which this is the fourth, are
a rare opportunity to see a range of touring productions in the same
place at the same time.
This year, the companies will be gathering from as far afield as Northumberland,
the Hebrides and Canada for a conference and festival to explore the
themes of race and culture, class and countryside. A series of discussions,
entitled Cobbett Sessions in honour of that great touring autodidact
and writer of Rural Rides, William Cobbett, will pursue these
themes with guest speakers, and discussions focused on the plays themselves.
Twelve different plays will be performed over Friday and Saturday,
most of them offering two performance times so that it's possible to
put together an Edinburgh-style day-long programme of theatre. Tickets
are very reasonable: you can see three performances for as little as
£15, but for a more generous fee it's possible to join the conference
as a delegate, and attend some additional special performances as well
as the Cobbett Sessions.
The productions being showcased range from revivals (Under Milk
Wood and Eastern Angles' own Sutton Hoo Mob) to adaptations
of classic plays (Wycherley's Restoration comedy The Country Wife)
and classic novels (Great Expectations and The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists) to a variety of new works. Cambridge-based Menagerie
will perform Clare's Walk, Steve Waters' documentary drama about
poet John Clare's journey across eastern England in 1841, while Theatre
Hebrides is offering Kevin MacNeil's account of a summer solstice at
the Callanish Stones in Lewis. The Callanish Stoned will be performed
in a mixture of Gaelic and English. The production from Ghost River
Theatre of Canada is Mesa, a road-movie style drama about an
old man's journey from Calgary to Arizona.
Details, festival brochure and tickets are available from the Eastern
Angles website at www.easternangles.co.uk,
by phone on 01473 211498 or by post from Sir John Mills Theatre, Gatacre
Road, Ipswich IP1 2LQ. There are also more details in our news
story of 2nd January.
Jill Sharp
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