Menagerie are currently mentoring playwright Andrew Burton, working on Andrew’s play Waterlog, an adaptation of the book of the same name by the late and much-lauded Roger Deakin. You can see this at the Pulse Festival, Ipswich in June. Click playwright mentoring for further details…

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Right now, as I sit in the relative calm of the Menagerie office, the Hotbed actors are downstairs in rehearsals.  They each have one hand placed on the truck parked in their rehearsal room.  And in the other hand, they’re holding scripts for Anna Reynolds’ new play Stand By Your Van! The latest draft is hot-off-the-press.  We finished a read-through this morning and it’s looking fantastic: funny, poignant and gripping!

Tomorrow we’ll be moving onto some of the other plays in the festival, splitting the actors between rehearsals for Richard Fredman’s play Four For Jericho and Clare Bayley’s piece At Sea.

We’ve also just opened submission for the One-Page-Play-Competition-athon!  Click here to find out how you could see your writing up on stage at Hotbed Festival.

hotbed, menagerie anna reynolds, at sea, clare bayley, festival, four for jericho, hotbed, junction, menagerie, richard fredman, stand by your van, theatre

Preparations for Hotbed 2009 are now moving at quite a pace!  The full Hotbed line-up has been announced and you can download the festival brochure as a pdf from this page here.

The Hotbed creative team are working hard to make sure that every play in Hotbed achieves its maximum potential.  Over the next few weeks, the directors will be working closely with all the writers taking part, as scripts are developed and finalised.

I had a wonderful meeting last week with Jennifer Tuckett, whose new play There’s No Need To Panic will receive its first ever public airing at Hotbed.  Jennifer’s play was one of my personal favourite submissions for the festival.  And it was fantastic to meet her for the first time and to discover that we’d been thinking along exactly the same lines, in terms of the development of the script and our ambitions for it.

Roll on Hotbed 2009!  25 June to 4 July at The Junction, Cambridge.

DR

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menagerie Patrick Morris, Paul Bourne, Re:Design, Terry Molloy

Artistic Director Paul Bourne and Conceptual artist Chris Dobrowloski present a new workshop; The Art of Survival Innovation and Risk in Uncertain Times in association with Ashcroft International Business School. Click here for more information and contact Paul if you wish to nominate a colleague to attend. This event is invitation only.

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Workshops are now in full swing for our major production about twelve contestants in and endurance competition to win a Pick-up truck. Anna Reynolds will be writing the script and Jaimie Gramston will be creating the film montage. The show will open in Hotbed 2009 before moving to the Edinburgh Fringe.

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Patrick has been working with six of our attachment writers to develop and record new short radio scripts with BBC producers Fiona Kelcher and Abgail Lefleming. Listen out for the results on our website soon!

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