Bard Strikes Back In South Hams With Lottery Award
28.04.2008 10:32:00
Totnes will be treated to a Shakespeare festival produced by a Hollywood scriptwriter with the help of an Awards for All grant of £1,000. The project is one of three grants in South Hams and 84 in the South West totalling £514,166, in the latest round of awards.
Playgoers Society of Dartington Hall will spend its £1,000 award on a series of workshops overseen by Jonathan Hales, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and worked with renowned director George Lucas on the Indiana Jones movie series. Mr Hales, whose CV also includes stints as Literary Manager and Director of the Royal Court Theatre, London, Artistic Director of the Phoenix Theatre, London, and Associate Director at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, will oversee several workshops where a production of Shakespeare’s King John featuring local, amateur actors will be developed. The production will then be staged from 20 June until 28 June in the landscape gardens of Dartington Hall, Totnes.
Sarah Welsh, Honorary Treasurer, said: “The Playgoers Society of Dartington Hall is an amateur theatre group established around 60 years ago. We now have nearly 200 members and we’re best known for our annual open-air productions in the private gardens at the Hall itself. We put on public performances three times a year and also produce small-scale studio work, which tends to be more experimental.
“We’re running these workshops for several reasons: to get people in the community involved in our Dartington Summer Shakespeare series, to increase membership and to pass on skills in verse reading, delivery, and interpreting text. Obviously, we’re delighted to have Jonathan Hales involved, he has been part of some fantastic theatres, productions and films, and he’ll run several full day workshops for about 20 people. In the process, we’ll develop a production of King John, which is a Shakespeare play that’s seldom performed. It’s a cracking play, an action piece, and it should prove very popular when it opens in summer.”
Elsewhere in South Hams, Totnes Development Trust will receive £7,200 to research the history of the old Reeves timber yard and produce an illustrated book and accompanying exhibition for the entire community to enjoy.
The timber yard was the focal point of the town of Totnes for over 100 years before its closure in the early 1990s. The Trust will use its funding to employ an oral historian in interviewing as many ex-Reeves’ employees as possible, in addition to covering the costs of the book and exhibition.
Thena Kendall, Secretary, said: “It’s amazing to think that in the early twentieth century, the timber yard in Totnes enabled such a small town to trade internationally, often with the Baltic States and Russia, whose ships would travel up the Dart river. So much of our heritage is tied up with the yard and we hope to interview as many ex-employees as possible, to find out what they did, their methods of work and so on. Our oral historian will engage in research, but we’ll also get local schoolchildren to take questionnaires home and ask their parents and grandparents about it. The research will take a year, then we’ll stage an exhibition in the Totnes Image Bank at the Town Mill and produce a heavily illustrated book in summer 2009.”
Another project in South Hams set to receive funding is Harbertonford Village Hall, which will spend £10,000 in improving its access for those with disabilities.
Awards for All is the small grants scheme administered by the Big Lottery Fund on behalf of Lottery good cause funders, Arts Council England, Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Sport England. The scheme makes awards of between £300 and £10,000 to grass-roots community groups and voluntary organisations.
Mark Cotton, Big Lottery Fund Head of the South West region, said on behalf of Awards for All: “The people of South Hams will get a real treat at the Summer Shakespeare in Dartington Hall thanks to this Lottery funding. Projects like this and the Totnes Development that will help capture the memories of the area are great examples of the work that £514,166 worth of Lottery funding will do in this round of awards.”
For a full list of award recipients visit: http://www.awardsforall.org.uk/england/news.html
Client name: The Big Lottery Fund
Web link: www.biglotteryfund.org.uk
