It’s getting to that time when we announce our new productions for 2025-2026 and we have been working through that process for some weeks.

WHAT DOES CHOOSING A PLAY INVOLVE?

The Petuaria Players pride themselves in striving to put on productions that are as professional as a small amateur group can achieve, an aim that many in our audiences will agree we often attain.

That is one of the criteria that informs us during our process of choosing plays but there are others that make the task surprisingly challenging.

We have a database of almost 200 plays that we have read, reviewed or performed over the years and in addition a limited number of us search out new productions that fit our criteria. That can be difficult, often working only on a synopsis and some reviews before deciding which ones to risk purchasing at around £12-£15 per script in order to read the full text (libraries are not what they were).

For the producers who carry out the selection task all the candidate plays need to be read, characters considered against our available actors and an assessment of whether the set can be constructed within our traditional stage area. A time consuming job.

But the selection process for candidate plays is complex – we need to try and hit a number of requirements;

SOME OF THE SELECTION CRITERIA

• Is the play any good? Upon examination many turn out to be inappropriate, unpopular, or just plain poor and weak.
• Which actors are available for the play – if only one or two men or women are available then many plays are immediately ruled out.
• Can the play characters be played convincingly by the available actors? Whilst age and gender can be stretched, especially in certain types of play, there is a limit.
• What is the size of the role and the relative experience and ability of the actor in meeting it?
• When we have a shortlist we need to apply for licenses and ensure there are no performance restrictions.
• We always aim to ensure that those who wish to act on stage are cast in a play but this is not always possible when trying to achieve the above.
• Apart from considering if the actors will like a play the producer / director must be committed to it too as they will be spending many hours over the next three months totally immersed in the entire script, it’s design and its direction at every rehearsal.

It’s a tearing-out-hair task that is a difficult balancing act involving compromises and a mix of excitement and disappointment for the members – hopefully more of the former if we get it right.

That is all behind the scenes. For our audiences all we hope you see is a yet another season of wonderful plays.

More news soon…