Lucky Sods – The Album | Petuaria Players

Photo album that is, you know we don’t do musicals! We have a few photos to share with you and you can view them below.

A successful run

It is almost a month since our run of John Godber’s Lucky Sods came to an end. It was a sellout - good for our small drama group cash reserves and help with our upkeep, and even better for the actors, performing in front of packed appreciative houses every night. The joy of live theatre is the interaction with an audience, making every performance unique.

We kept the play true to it’s original timing – the early years of the National Lottery, Cilla Black’s Blind Date and the channel tunnel referred to as ’The Chunnel’ (well, that never caught on!).

A rough journey that ended well

Janet, directing, used a simple black drapes set with minimal furniture and props to suggest the setting for each of the ten scenes. This was a good move – whilst the end product was a great success the journey there was a challenging one. Before we started rehearsals we knew that we had a minimum of actors to perform with just one person backstage and lots of scheduled holiday weeks for some actors that would impact rehearsals. But we were determined to put a show on and we planned our work accordingly around the issues; flexible rehearsals (which made life harder for Rob who had so many words to learn), and actors doubling up to carry out backstage roles when not on the stage.

As if that wasn’t enough we also had a difficult start due to an unusually late delivery of scripts from the publisher, a round of covid infections that laid a few of us low and kept us away from rehearsals – and then Gill broke her wrist which explains the photos with her elegant cast in place. How many audience members noticed though? And if they did they may yet be wondering if they had missed an element in the plot where her character Jean broke her wrist….

*Gill’s broken wrist “the show must go on!”*

*Ready to go on* – *seven actors and five backstage crew in one photo*

With the very real issue of having no-one to operate the sound and lights we were fortunate to have Paul Morrell re-appear on the Petuaria Players scene after a gap of nearly twenty years. Paul, a regular on the stage in the past, took on the role of Sound and Lights operator and saved us a lot of grief. Good news – he’ll be doing the same on the next play too.

Lucky Sods – the Photos