THE ST GEORGE'S PLAYERS
The St George's Players' first production was a performance on the Sunday evening before Christmas 2000 of The Mysteries, a new version by Edward Kemp for the Royal Shakespeare Company, of the medieval mystery play cycles. We performed the scenes covering the childhood of Mary and her marriage to Joseph (these scenes are from the Apocryphal Gospels), the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Flight into Egypt. This production, which had a cast of twenty-three and took place in the church, played to a large and enthusiastic audience. It was performed in modern dress, partly for financial reasons, but also because we were following the example of medieval productions which were performed in the costumes of the time, thus helping the audience to relate more easily to the gospel story.
In January 2005 the Players put on a production of J.B. Priestley's metaphysical thrillet, An Inspector Calls for three performances in the church hall. This proved to be a tremendous success, playing to capacity audiences at each performance. Noel Coward's witty comedy, Hay Fever in January 2006 proved equally popular and at the Sunday matinée extra chairs had to be hurriedly brought in to accommodate late arrivals.
In April 2009 we attempted something rather different. THIS and THAT was a light-hearted miscellany of poetry and prose, with items by Alan Bennett, including one of his celebrated Talking Heads monologues, hilarious poems by Scotland's worst poet, William McGonagall and Brief Lives, an abridged version of a one-man play based on the writings of the seventeenth centry diarist, John Aubrey. All the members of the cast were in top form and those who saw the production were loud in their praise. Sadly, however, largely due to the school hoidays, attendances at all three performances were poor. For the benefit of those who wanted to see the show but were unable to do so, we gave one repeat performance of a slightly shortened version followed by a pot luck supper, on Saturday, 30 January at 7.30 pm.