As I sit here typing this blog I feel quite nostalgic. The founding members of Whole Hog all meet up last weekend for a few drinks and a meal and before we knew where we were we were back reminiscing about the company’s first adventure into the festival scene. We performed a new absurdist comedy by local writer, Chris Scott entitled ‘Directions’.
Back in 2009 we launched Whole Hog with ‘Directions’ as an entry
into Swindon’s Harold Jolliffe One Act Play Festival and I can remember standing on the side of the stage ready for the very first performance and fellow cast Steve Sprosson whispered into my ear “you know we’ve never run this all the way through properly” I gulped hard and the other cast member Ryan Gilks turned very pale. But Steve wasn’t lying, rehearsals had been quite chaotic with stops, starts and general corpsing all round! Not helped by director Phil Regan going off on tour for a month after working with us for the first few weeks and then not returning to view his creation until that night at the HJ Festival! We had been very bad actors indeed in terms of ‘strict’ run-throughs!
So, was a real shock to all of us when we won the festival! I know that’s a bit of a cliché but in our case the absolute truth. As we continued on our festival journey that year with ‘Directions’ there were many incidents! The quarter final was another shock as there was a very strong entry from a Gloucestershire group that looked like deservedly winning. The semi final brought a hilarious weekend in Teingmouth with too much drink, hangovers and all round silliness and the adjudicator memorably saying “I didn’t particularly like this play in reading it but I will put it through to the final!”
The final itself was kind of an anti-climax as although we received great audience praise our adjudicator that day had kind of missed the point of the play or perhaps we just didn’t do it justice? Both statements are
probably true.
So, we now find ourselves ready to compete in our fourth quarter final (we went straight into the semi finals last year due to a festival being closed) and as ‘old hands’perhaps some of the newness and excitement is subdued but we have a lovely little theatre in the Woolstore to perform in (their air conditioning is amazing!). Working in new venues is always a great chance to explore different spaces in performance as well as reach a new audience with our work.
Look out for another blog after Saturday’s adventure...