Volunteer actors ready for Rose experience (From This Is Local London)

Volunteer actors ready for Rose experience

1:20pm Friday 3rd September 2010 in

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The history of Kingston will be brought to life on The Rose Theatre’s stage next week as Our Town: A Kingston Story begins a four day run at the venue.

This new play is the result of a community project organised by the theatre and it will be performed during the course of the run by two different companies of volunteer actors.

The show, billed as “a celebration of the past, present and future of Kingston”, spans time periods and resurrects well-known and obscure characters and incidents from the town’s history.

It is the first community project of its kind run by The Rose and it has attracted a wide range of participants, aged from 17-78 and with varying degrees of theatrical experience.

Bernice Baker, 46, from Chessington, has ten years in amateur dramatics under her belt, but she says Our Town is a big step up for her.

“Amateur dramatics is great fun but I wanted more of a challenge,” she explains.

“Having the chance to do a play that is hot off the presses and has never been done before is really exciting.”

For another of the performers, New Malden resident Katie Worsley, 57, the Our Town project is a totally new as she has never set foot on stage before - in fact she only got involved in it by accident.

“I originally came to the project because I quite like art so I thought I would help with painting the background but I came on the wrong day,” she says.

“There werre 12 of us playing this game with Jamie [Harper, the show’s director] to learn each others names. He then said: ‘Let’s improvise something’ and before i knew it we were acting.”

Worsley, like many of the company members, will have plenty of support in the audience from family and friends and she says she can’t wait to be treading the boards at a theatre where she is usually an usher.

“I think the Rose is a fantastic place and I think it is wonderful that the the community is being allowed to get in there and do something,” she says.

“World famous actors have been up on that stage and to think that me, who is completely pants, has the opportunity to get up there too is really exciting.”

Our Town: A Kingston Story, Rose Theatre Kingston, September 9-12, for more information and to book tickets, visit rosetheatrekingston.org