The Company is an amateur theatre group with members across Sheffield and South Yorkshire. We have been established for over a decade and have developed a reputation for high quality theatre worthy of the professional stage. We perform three plays a year at The University of Sheffield's Drama Studio, a renowned intimate theatre venue. Our members are encouraged to give creative input at all stages of production including script writing, set design, stage management, directing and acting. Our next production is Aphra Behn's The Rover which will be in the Drama Studio from Wednesday June 18th until Saturday June 21st and at the Dore festival Wednesday July 9th.

This blog will contain the thoughts and feelings of those members of The Company putting together this production of The Rover.

Who is blogging here? John is our leading man playing Willmore, the eponymous 'Rover' he is also managing the production, ensuring that all the disparate creative and technical strands come together to produce a whole play. Cassandra is new to on stage work with The Company having previously been part of the epic crew for "Noises Off". Alison is the director and has also done some of the adaption work to ensure the audience can understand what is going on and that the dirty jokes really shine though. Tony is playing Ned Blunt and will be battling with being typecast as a bumbling idiot and comedy costuming.

Blog Archive:

Saturday, 5 April 2008

Running around like a madman...

...which seems to be what most of us do in this play. I love the outrageousness of the script and the single mindedness and sheer chutzpah of the characters.

We did a lot of blocking on Wednesday with a lot of people on stage at once. At occasions when it said "they fight", Alison froze everyone in place and I frantically scribbled down where they were and who was fighting who. We then moved to the positions at the end of the fight and I mapped out the characters again. All I have to do now is work out what happens in between. There were helpful comments later in the pub about the use of pineapples.

I echo Ben's comments about Andy and Nigel's upstaging. I'll have to make sure we stand in front of them during the fight scenes...

Finally, funniest comment so far goes to Amber who missed most of a conversation about the problem with insects in summer in Scotland and asked who had been "bitten by midgets".

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