The General Election has caused us to amend the schedule for the 2017 Lighthorne Festival of One-Act Plays because our Village Hall venue is a polling station.
The planned programme for Thursday June 8 is therefore being shifted en bloc to Tuesday June 6 and the Festival will take a break on the Thursday night.
We are extremely grateful to the three groups involved – Kenilworth Priory, Phoenix Players Stratford and Banbury Cross Players – for agreeing to this change and to Lighthorne Drama Group for moving their rehearsal from the Tuesday night to accommodate it.
The planned programmes for the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday will go ahead unchanged and no other groups will be affected.
Our adjudicator, Paul Fowler, GoDA, has been fully consulted and is supportive of the rescheduling. Adjudicators are used to “split” Festivals where, for example, a one-act competition might take place over a couple of nights, followed by two nights of full-length plays before a return to the one-act section again. I am 100% certain that no groups will be disadvantaged in any way by the changes.
As a reminder, the Box Office is currently open for priority booking by groups for the night they are appearing (plus two tickets each for the Saturday night).
The Box Office opens to the general public on Friday April 28, after which time priority booking allocations cannot be guaranteed.
To purchase tickets, contact the Festival box office at: lighthornefestival@gmail.com
or telephone: 01926 651411
or use the contact form on the website – lighthornefestival.org.uk
Twelve Amateur Theatre companies will perform a dozen plays over four nights in this year’s fifth Lighthorne Festival of One Act Plays.
Participating groups include newcomers Total Arts Community Theatre from Tamworth, Staffs, who are former national champions, together with a number of other former national finalists, and previous winners Abbey Players from Nuneaton.
The annual event will be staged from Wednesday June 7 to Saturday June 10, 2017, in Lighthorne Village Hall.
Festival Chairman Rod Chaytor said:”The Lighthorne Festival has now become firmly established and continues to attract groups with national reputations from a wide geographical area.
“But it is also very pleasing to see the regular return of local groups who have been with us from the start.”
Paul Fowler (right), this year’s Lighthorne Adjudicator and current chairman of the Guild of Drama Adjudicators, appeared on stage as an Oliver Hardy impersonator in the 2016 Lighthorne Festival.Lighthorne Festival is said to be unique because of its village setting, its charity-focused prize structure and cafe-theatre format in which the audience sits informally at tables, a glass of wine in front of them, and supper is served during the intervals.
As in previous years, groups will be competing not just for a handsome, engraved glass trophy but also a £500 cash prize plus the right to donate a matching sum to a registered charity of their choice.
Entrants will also be competing for the opportunity to enter the National Drama Festivals Association’s British All-Winners Finals to be held this year from Monday July 17 to Sunday July 23 at The Lamproom Theatre, Barnsley.
NDFA’s one-act playwriting competition, the George Taylor Memorial Award, has again attracted strong interest from Lighthorne entrants with half the entries being self-written original work.
This year sees a change of adjudicator with Paul Fowler, chairman of the Guild of Drama Adjudicators, taking charge. Paul, a Lighthorne regular, has unique experience of the Lighthorne Festival, having been an audience member in the inaugural year of 2013 and last year having appeared on stage with his theatre group, White Cobra of Northampton, in “Another Fine Mess” by Gillian Plowman, and also directing the winning entry, “Housebound” by Simon Mawdsley.
The Box Office for this year’s Lighthorne Festival opens on Friday April 28 , 2017 and can be accessed by emailing lighthornefestival@gmail.com or via a website link on lighthornefestival.org.uk or by ringing 01926 651411. Tickets are £12.50 each including a meal. A four-night Season Ticket is available at a reduced rate of £45.00.
The running order for the 2017 Lighthorne Festival of One-Act Plays can be found in the Entrants section on the website.
A touring company from Northampton has won the fourth annual Lighthorne Festival of One-Act plays.
White Cobra took the coveted trophy with Housebound by Simon Mawdsley, a comedy about a burglary gone wrong, which they entered at the last minute to help the organisers after another group pulled out.
Lighthorne Festival winners 2016, Housebound by Simon Mawdsley, directed by Paul Fowler, performed by Winners White Cobra Theatre Company of Northampton. Richard Jordan as Bone the burglar, and Kate Billingham as Fiona, the agoraphobic housewife.
The East Midlands theatre company, previous national champions, had already submitted their first choice, a tragi-comic story behind a Laurel and Hardy tribute act, entitled Another Fine Mess by Gillian Plowman.
The group performed both plays on the second night (Thursday June 9, 2016) of the four-night Festival in which ten amateur theatre companies presented 12 plays in Lighthorne Village Hall, Warwickshire.
Second were Great Witley Operatic Society from Worcestershire with the Burnand and Sullivan comic operetta, Cox and Box.
Nuneaton’s Abbey Players, who were defending their title as the 2015 champions, came third and fourth respectively with their two plays, Boxing Day and Just a Straight Man. The adjudicator was Jan Palmer Sayer who is a Council Member of the Guild of Drama Adjudicators.
White Cobra now qualify for consideration for the National Drama Festivals Association British All-Winners Finals, to be held this year in Hertford at the end of July. Lighthorne is a NDFA-recognised Festival.
Two local playwrights whose plays were performed during the Festival, Ginny Davis from Lighthorne Drama Group with her gentle WI comedy Arrows of Desire, and Nick Marsh from Rugby Theatre with his World War Two thriller A Frank Exchange, have been nominated for NDFA’s original writing competition by the adjudicator and the Festival chairman, Rod Chaytor.
Arrows of Desire, tells the story of the chairman of a village WI group battling dwindling numbers, written by local playwright Ginny Davis and performed by Ginny herself (right) together with Sharon Bayliss, who played the part of Anna Gold (left), directed by Victoria Pritchard.
He said:” For the second year running, our top four participants achieved or surpassed a score of 80, which is the Guild of Drama Adjudicators’ benchmark of excellence, and two other groups were as close as possible behind.
“We have again this year been getting really positive feedback from our village, the wider audiences and participating groups. Everyone seems to have had a fantastic time.
“Our guests this year included two other GoDA Council members, two national Council members of the National Drama Festivals Association, a national officer and two regional officers from the All-England Theatre Festival plus a regional officer from the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.
“It is a tribute to our event and the village team which runs it that so many Festival organisers of national significance came from all over the country to see how we do it, just to enjoy it, or both.”
The organisers paid tribute to the Stratford-based theatre company, Caramba, their inaugural 2013 winners, who also stepped in to fill a breach with a self-written monologue by director Kate Guest; and another Stratford group, Phoenix Players, who managed to shift an 11-hander from one night to another to accommodate forced changes to the running order.
Next year’s Lighthorne Festival will run from Wednesday June 7 to Saturday June 10, 2017. Expressions of Interest from would-be participating groups are invited to chairman Rod Chaytor on rod.chaytor@icloud.com by October 31, this year.
