Longueville Little Theatre Company
The BIG Little Theatre
It is only hours before the opening of a British adult farce, Nothing On, and the touring company is hurriedly running through a final dress rehearsal in the Grand Theatre, Weston-SuperMare, before the first audience arrives.
Act One
During the first act, we are an audience to this production of a play within a play. The Nothing On cast is loveable, but mainly inept; however, we cheer for them under our breath and hope that they can pull it together and get the show on the road.
Dotty, the actor playing Mrs. Clackett, can’t remember her entrances and exits. Garry, the male love interest, can’t remember his lines. And Brooke, playing Vicki, the female lead, is constantly posing and primping, without any understanding of what the play is about or what she is doing. Trying to pull this all together into some semblance of a presentable show is the director, Lloyd Dallas, who is sitting in the darkened auditorium shouting out directions and trying to get everybody ready for opening.
Act 2, however, dashes all our hopes.
Act Two
For this act, we, the audience, are sitting backstage; the entire set has been turned 180 degrees. We can hear the actors performing out front, but what we see is the back side of the scenery flats, the stage manager trying to keep the action flowing and everybody happy, and the various antics of the actors offstage between their exits and entrances.
The play has been on the road for one month now, and relationships between cast members, as well as the quality of Nothing On have deteriorated. Garry and Dotty are in the middle of an unhappy love affair. Poppy, the assistant stage manager is pregnant; and Selsdon Mowbray, an actor in his late sixties, is trying to stay sober between scenes. Add to this, a visit by director Lloyd, who is there first of all to comfort his “overly excited” lover, Brooke, and second to try and save his play from total disaster.
Most of the company is in a continual state of agitation, and this disorder is carrying over into the play, causing missed entrances, flubbed lines, and general hilarity.
Act 3 is even more frenetic.
Act Three
It is a month later again, and the tour is reaching an end. We, the audience, are out front again, watching a performance of Nothing On that has reached the point of complete and hilarious deterioration. The business of performing the show has become subordinate to the business of solving personal problems.
Dotty refuses to come out of her dressing room. Garry is now drinking Selsdon’s whiskey. Scenery collapses, and props explode. Practical jokes have become common, and actors are now taking verbal, and sometimes physical, cracks at each other both backstage and on stage. Normal rules of logic and response don’t apply anymore.
Ultimately, however, they carry off the show--in some semblance. The unhappy band of actors manages to get to the last line, spoken by Selsdon: “When all around is strife and uncertainty, there’s nothing like...(takes the plate of sardines)...a good old-fashioned plate of curtain!”
William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy about a cross-dressing, ship-wreck surviving, poetry-loving girl who finds herself at the center of a not-so-average love triangle.
Twelfth Night, one of the best of Shakespeare’s mature comedies, is a play of lovers and their wooing. This play exemplifies various aspects of love: its sweetness, transitoriness, folly, and importance. It depicts various types of love: the melancholic love of Duke Orsino, hopelessly in love with love itself; the mourning love of Olivia for her dead brother; the mistaken love of the arrogant, humorless Malvolio; the true love of Viola for her master. The Elizabethan audience, like audiences today, confronted themselves in characters who experience self-deception, deceit, illusion, and reality—all in the name of love. Structurally, the play is an example of excellent workmanship with both the main plot and subplot superbly planned, embodying a variety of lively incidents. The characters, sharply drawn and completely formed, have in turn their moments on the stage, with no one overshadowing anyone else.
The central situation is a disreputable Paris hotel where all but one of the first act's characters meet. The down-trodden husband is offering consolation to a dissatisfied wife of his best friend. His friend has been sent by the sanitary authorities to investigate ghostly noises in the haunted room suggestive of a defective water tank. A country innocent, an acquaintance of both families, is trying to find cheap accommodation for a large family of daughters. A studious youth whose subject is Spinoza on Passion, arrives with the parlour maid, who shares his interest in the subject.
The number of rooms and doors are barely equal to the strain of the complications that follow.
Love has its ups and downs, but this play is a whole other storey.
Barbara is resolutely single, having dedicated her life to her career as secretary to the powerful city executive Marcus. Her neat little world is as carefully and quietly organised as her neat little flat, with few distractions save the relentlessly cheerful Gilbert who lives downstairs. However, when an old school friend Nikki and her fiancé Hamish rent the flat upstairs, her life is turned upside down and back to front. When Barbara meets Hamish, it’s hate at first sight. Or is it?
As the hapless characters live up to the promise of the title, Ayckbourn combines pathos, farce and romance in an irresistible cocktail of ecstasy and embarrassment. A wondrous mix of domestic comedy and sexual tragedy, a raw, painful and uproarious evening.
If you've ever loved and lost, loved and left or just loved and lusted then Things We Do For Love will be just your thing...
Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be a priest. He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there's a right side... There's the witches: Young Agnes, who really is in two minds about everything. Magrat, who isi trying to combine witchcraft and nappies. Nanny Ogg who is far too knowwing...and Granny Weatherwax, who is big trouble. And the vampires (sorry, vampyrs) are intelligent - not easily got rid of with a garlic enema or going to the window, grasping the curtains and saying "I don't know about you, but isn't it a bit stuffy in here?". They've got style and fancy waistcoats. They're out of the casket and want a bite of the future.
LLTC are please to announce our annual showcase, this year held at the Chrysalis Theatre. A little earlier in the year than usual, but no less enjoyable for it!
The first half of our show will consist of a music quiz, so join in if you know your Beatles from your Blondie and The Streets from The Stones then you could win our top prize: the admiration of your friends and family
Then we’ll be serving dinner, a buffet, which you can wash down with a selection of very reasonably priced drinks from our licensed bar
The second half will be a mixture of sketches and songs performed by the LLTC members and our fabulous house band Ginger and the Nuts
This is a tale of two worlds; the human world and the world of the faeries and how these two realms collide.
This is a tale where mortals may love magical immortal fairy queens, and queens may love asses.
This is a comedy of misplaced loves and magic, of desire and misdirection and hidden identity.
This is a night that no mortal of fairy will ever forget, and it is all orchestrated by the mischievous fairy Puck.
This is a story of fools be they mortal or otherwise.
It Could be Any One of Us is a typical Ayckbourn play - a cast of six (3 men, 3 women), five of them being of the same family and one outsider.
The father of the family is getting on in years and announces that he has changed his will to include a young lady who he used to teach piano and who he hasn't seen for 20 years. When she arrives on the scene, the arguments that ensue result in a death, but not of who you would expect.
Whodunnit? Well, it could be any one of us!!
Imagine the situation: a bridegrooms wakes on his wedding morning in his own bridal suite, with his bride-to-be about to arrive any moment, and finds in bed beside him - a naked girl.
A cross between Fawlty Towers and a Whitehall farce, this hilarious play moves at the speed of light, with a riot a minute that will leave the audience aching with laughter… the perfect medicine for all those thinking about getting married.
Confusions is the overall title for five playlets that are loosely linked with undertones of human eccentricities and the dilemma of loneliness. They are set in a living room, a bar, a restaurant, a marquee and a park.
The first – Mother Figure – portrays a woman, socially marooned for most of the day with her young children, who is unable to escape from using baby talk while entertaining her neighbours.
In Drinking Companion a commercial traveller tries his hand at seduction with either or both of two perfume salesgirls.
Between Mouthfuls deals with two couples eating at separate tables in a restaurant. There are previous links between them but at first the couples do not communicate with each other. As a waiter hovers between the tables we hear only the snatches of conversation that he hears.
Described by one national director as “probably the best short comedy ever written”, Gosforth’s Fête is a romp at a garden bazaar. Nothing goes according to plan and an illicit affaire is made public in typical Ayckbourn style.
A Talk in the Park brings the play to a close with five individuals on park benches baring their souls in one-sided conversations.
Guards! Guards! is from the prolific pen of Terry Pratchett and has been adapted for the stage by Stephen Briggs.
Terry Pratchett's infamous city of Ankh Morpork is under threat from a 60 foot fire breathing dragon, summoned by a secret society of malcontented tradesmen.
Defending Ankh Morpork against this threat is the entire, underpaid, undervalued City Night Watch - a drunken and world-weary Captain, a cowardly and overweight Sergeant, a small opportunistic Corporal or dubious parentage and their newest recruit, Lance-Constable Carrot, who is upright, literal, law-abiding and keen. Aiding them in their fight for truth, justice and the Ankh Morporkian way are a small swamp dragon called Errol and the Librarian of Unseen University (who just happens to be an orang-utan).
In this dark comedy by Frank Marcus, Sister George is the goody-goody heroine of Applehurst, an everyday story of country folk, on BBC radio daily. Pop-popping around the village on her scooter, District Nurse Sister George dispenses wisdom and bonhomie to all and sundry, and is as much revered by the nation at large as she is in fictional Applehurst.
However, George represents the nice side of June Buckridge, the actress who plays her on the radio. In her private life, George is a brawling, bullying, hard drinking and abusive lesbian, who is not averse to knocking about her submissive live-in lover, Alice (Childie) McNaught, in order to bend her to her will.
When the BBC decide to kill off Sister George to improve the Applehurst ratings, the sparks really begin to fly.
Our annual showcase including sketches, songs and a music quiz
A mad cap British farce about mistresses and minks in the London fur salon of Bodley, Bodley, and Crouch. Gilbert Bodley plans to sell an expensive mink to a mobster, dirt cheap for his wife, because the wife is Gilbert's mistress and he wants to "Close the deal." However, instead of doing his own dirty work, he gets his reluctant partner, Arnold Crouch, to do it for him. Things go awry when the mobster plans to buy it for his OWN mistress and soon the whole plan goes out the window along with women's clothing and a few other things. Mistaken identities, scantily clad women kept hidden in closets, mobsters, suspicious wives, and misguided shoppers keep this comedy trucking along.
Even though she's 114 years old, Charley's Aunt can still be one funny lady, thanks to the timeless theatrical devices of mistaken identities, sight gags, and physical humour.
It's the story of two college boys, Jack and Charley, who want to go out with their girlfriends, Kitty and Amy, but can't go anywhere in Victorian England without a chaperone. A proper chaperone seems to be in the offing when the boys learn that Charley's rich aunt, Donna Lucia, will soon come to town.
When Donna Lucia sends word that she can't come after all, the boys don't scuttle their plans; they recruit one of their classmates, Lord Fancourt Babberly, to impersonate Charley's aunt. He dresses up in a black satin skirt, a pair of mitts, an old-fashioned cap and a wig. "She" is so fetching (to say nothing of her most attractive fortune) that Amy's Uncle Stephen and Jack's father, Sir Francis, immediately begin to court her.
Into all this mayhem arrives the genuine aunt, Donna Lucia, accompanied by Babberly's beloved, Ela.