The unexpected

For a number of years, when the president of the board of the local arts council was a bloke with a background in theatre, we had an honest to god theatre festival every August. Four days, up to 12 shows. It was bliss. If you were a theatre lover. Said bloke left, but the following year there was still a theatre festival. That same year they also staged a music festival weekend in early September. A conclusion was quickly reached that trying to do two separate festivals with a limited crew of volunteers to oversee them was just too much. This led, the following year, to a combined theatre and music festival, which was fine. Not as much theatre, but still a fair bit. Then came Covid. No festival whatsoever in 2020. A scaled back version, all local, all outdoors, came back in 2021. Three plays, with two performances each, and multiple gigs. Happily the weather co-operated and it was great to be seeing actual live theatre after a year and a half of Zoom and online shows. Last summer it was back to four days with theatre pieces and musicians once more arriving from off island. Great fun for many of us, but apparently there were complaints from some people who either thought it was too much in too short a period of time or who just didn’t like having to bring their own chairs to sit in at the outdoor stage.  So this year, this week, the festival is back, stretched out over a much longer period with one or two shows per day at various venues, most of them indoors. And most of them music, not a lot of theatre to be found in the brochure and what there was will be staged in small venues with no mask mandate for the audiences. Sigh.

Said arts council was very supportive of us during the lockdown days of online shows. So, when the current executive director contacted me to say they were desperately short of volunteers – particularly of outgoing people to flog 50/50 raffle tickets before the various shows (a major source of fundraising for them during the festival) and asked if we might be able to help, I put the word out. Happily five people came forward to say they’d be happy to help. Phew. (If it had been three or less I would have felt compelled to volunteer myself. All evidence to the contrary, I am not actually an outgoing person and the thought of trying to flog raffle tickets filled me with dread.) 

Three of the volunteers were keen to do their flogging in some sort of costume. They were quite willing to go as their Cinderella characters before realising the costumes, wigs and make-up were probably too much for a hot summer’s day.

So, yesterday I met them at our storage place to find and borrow whatever they wanted. 

Much hilarity ensued, including Helen finding a crayon costume I didn’t even know we had. (No idea when it was used.)

Then I remembered something. Back in 2016, when I was working on Robin’s script for The Return of Robin Hood, I decided, in a scene involving soldiers finding the heroes in Sherwood, that it would be way funnier if, instead of soldiers, we had this.

And it was funny. As multiple people said to me afterwards, no one expected the Spanish Inquisition.

With two Brits and another long-time Python fan in the mix, no persuasion was required whatsoever.

Who wouldn’t buy a raffle ticket from one of these three?

And there was a lovely postscript to this little outing. As I was leaving, I ran into the woman who owns our costume storage unit. She recognised me and told me how much she and her friends had enjoyed the one-act plays last weekend. Lots of praise for Ben and me in our roles. Then she said she’d been there with two male friends and felt embarrassed when she realised she was going to start crying at the end of the play, before noticing that both her companions had teared up, too. Praise indeed. (Oh, and like many other people, she simply could not believe the play was only 15 minutes long.)

We really did get it right.