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How we tour

Past productions

Environmental Events

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Most of our productions are created for touring.

• In the summer we perform outdoors
• At other times we perform indoors

We also create performances in and about specific locations. We call these environmental events.

Between June and September we perform outdoors, in communal social settings, creating events that contain something for people of all ages. Music and vibrant performances mix with puppets and ingenious sets. Our artistry and stagecraft is inspired by Commedia and Clowning, and our mission is to engage people in the thrill of live performance.

The recipe includes an eclectic mix of drama, comedy and energetic spectacle, and often results in the audience participating in a mass dance.

• It's summer madness say our audiences, enjoying their picnic.
  
  
• It's a visit by the contemporary Lords of Misrule say medieval historians.
  
  
• "A brilliant demonstration of how to hold an audience in the palm of your hand", said The Times.

We commission writers and we devise work, and it's often a combination of both. Subject matter can be both timeless (We created a version of Robin Hood in 1996) and contemporary (The Sheriff had plans to cut down the forest to make a faster road to London and King Richard).

We believe that the value of our outdoor summer performances lies in the integration of professional quality artistic endeavour into the social life of a community. Inspiring participation and effecting social cohesion both by the human subject matter of the work and the inclusive circumstances of its presentation.

We know the audience are there, and we make sure they know that we know, and together we play. Our funding partners often insist on no ticket charge.

In the winter we create shows for indoors, performing in village halls and other community spaces. These are created for similar reasons. In addition, the intimacy of a controlled indoor space can allow for more a more subtle and complex engagement between the show and the audience, together with a closer examination of human dilemmas.

Sometimes we deal with contemporary issues (Threshing About was an original black comedy about a farmer seeking to commit suicide on live TV to draw attention to the plight of the British Farmer); Sometimes we find contemporary ways of presenting timeless human dilemmas (our adaptation of A Christmas Carol, using large scale video projection, presented Scrooge isolated in his hi-tech office by the very communication technology he was using to control the world).

Often with our indoor shows we work together with members of The National Rural Touring Forum, enabling us to perform in rural parts of the country other theatre companies don't reach.