New Theatre Productions head indoors for Alan Bennett classic comedy

SussexWorld

New Theatre Productions have long been a summer essential on the Chichester arts calendar with their productions at West Dean Gardens during the Festival of Chichester.

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Always lovely

00:06to speak to Peter Breskell of New Theatre Productions, but slightly unusual to be speaking

00:11to Peter at this time of year, because you are doing something unusual. You are going

00:15indoors with a production of Habeas Corpus by Alan Bennett. Where is it going to be,

00:20and why? Why are you doing this?

00:23Well we're performing at the Tiddlesham Memorial Hall. We were invited to go along there because

00:29they've been very enterprising and have completely revamped what was an old football pavilion

00:36with a stage. And they've made a new floor, they've got new lighting and infrastructure,

00:43and they also have a bar. And they've never done a full two-act or three-act play there,

00:50and they're intending to do more of that because they want to encourage all forms of art at

00:57the Memorial Hall. And because we have connections with them, and they like what we do in the

01:04open air at West End, the Purdue Theatre, and we've got a lot of people that know them

01:09as well, I was asked if there was anything we could possibly do. We've had reasonably

01:14short notice, but we've decided to reprise Habeas Corpus, which is great fun. It's an

01:21Alan Bennett farce. If you want a good laugh, why not come along and enjoy it?

01:27And you did it last year, and you've managed to get almost the entire cast, haven't you?

01:31Yes, I have.

01:32Including yourself?

01:33I have indeed, yeah. I'm afraid I'm in it as well. And yeah, it's quite interesting

01:39actually because, although we've done it fairly recently, there's still a lot of work that

01:44has to be put in. You don't, when an actor, well I can't speak for all actors, but certainly

01:50when you do a play, you work very hard to learn the lines, do everything else involved.

01:55And quite often, especially if you're doing other things, almost immediately, or not long

02:00afterwards, you just put it to the back of your mind, and you don't remember the script.

02:05And so, in a way, it's almost harder, isn't it, to do something you've done recently?

02:10Because the great danger would be to think, oh, I know this.

02:14Well we've not approached it like that yet. That could be a mistake if you did that. We've

02:19got a very talented cast, not necessarily including myself in that, but all the others

02:25certainly an extremely talented cast, and they're very dedicated. Amateur actors have

02:31to give up, I mean the word amateur is sometimes used in the wrong way, because obviously people

02:37are not paid when they're amateurs, but it doesn't question their dedication. And you'll

02:43find that the people that were involved with us, and I know other local groups as well,

02:48put in an awful lot of effort in their spare time, and make something of it. And if you're

02:55trying to do something like this again, you can't take it for granted. We've had slightly

03:00less rehearsals than we would have done the original, but we've still had several rehearsals,

03:05even on not very nice nights, we turn out, and we go through things, we work at it, we

03:12try to recapture the standard that we reached when we got it to performance standard, before

03:18but you can't just pick it up, you know, there's no way that, you have to work at it,

03:24and if you manage to work at it, you can achieve a good result.

03:27Fantastic, and we'll allow you to maintain your mystery, but the fact is you are going

03:31to be an unusual salesman, dot dot dot.

03:34An unusual salesman, yes, and I think he's one of the characters that people will certainly

03:44laugh at, maybe with, but it's quite fun for me personally to do it with, we've got a tremendous

03:53camaraderie, obviously having done that before, and a lot of us have been another place together,

04:00and it's quite an uplifting feeling when you maybe don't see anybody for a little while,

04:06but you were in a production with them, and all of a sudden you get together again,

04:11and it's just like old friends reuniting, but we do take it very seriously, there's nobody

04:18who sits back and thinks, oh this is it, no, you have to work at it.

04:22Fantastic, well good luck with your out of season habeas corpus,

04:26lovely to speak to you again Peter, thank you.

04:28And you Phil, thank you very much for your time.

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