Enjoy a Change of Scene with Buxton Fringe Theatre

PRESS RELEASE 1st June 2014 - for immediate release

Theatre forms nearly a third of the entertainment at this year’s Buxton Fringe (July 9-27) and with so much creative imagination on display, it has the capacity to transport you to somewhere else entirely.

Sometimes the sense of physical dislocation is quite literal as when Fringe Award winners Butterfly invite you into Poole’s Cavern to meet Dracula’s Women Underground or Scrivener’s Bookshop, complete with Victorian cellar, becomes the spooky setting for Cul-de-sac theatre company’s The Ghosthunters’ Club and also for Threadbare Carpet’s The Good Lady Ducayne inspired by a Victorian horror story. Equally unnerving is Wireless Theatre’s chiller The Woman on the Bridge, set in Derbyshire’s grandest country house and performed in the opulent setting of The Palace Hotel.

Away from the more well-used theatre spots in Buxton, new managed venue The Market Place plays host to Orange and Pip Theatre’s After Alice written by Fringe New Writing nominee Lilly Posnett and focusing on three best friends processing their grief, or lack of, following a friend’s death. The Hydro Restaurant and Bar is the setting for a charmingly minimalist production of The Railway Children by Crowd of Two Theatre Company and The Old Hall Hotel provides the backdrop for Act-IV Theatre Company’s Oui Chef! about the Victorian chef Alexis Soyer. Look out for their special supper theatre evening there on July 14.

Other productions manage to take you back in time. Fringe favourite The Off-Off-Off Broadway Company brings its rich imagination to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window in Back Door, a reworking set in Twenties’ Paris. Hasland Theatre Company tells the true story of 19th-century ‘freak’ The Elephant Man and Breathe Out Theatre’s An Extraordinary Light takes us back to the last century to acknowledge the role played by scientist Rosalind Franklin in discovering the structure of DNA.

Music can really help to evoke the spirit of the past. Stage3 Theatre Company’s Professor Harry Stottle’s Music Hall Extravaganza recreates the Edwardian heyday of the British music hall while Arletty Theatre (acclaimed for Patchwork Lives last year) brings Swan Canaries, a musical play about the women who filled military shells during the First World War.

Family dynamics make for great theatre. Popular Fringe regular Ginny Davis, nominated for an award in 2011, performs alongside newcomer James Goldsworthy in Fashionably Late in which a family battle adversity to plan a party. Lady Parts Theatre explores the breakdown of family relationships in Because She Loved the Lion. Marital discord is at the heart of The Get Together by Broken Theatre while several couples are put under strain in Soiree, by Fiction, which won the Young Drama award at the Fringe in 2010. Serious issues are explored in Buxton Drama League’s Caroline in which a mother deals with the death of her child and Haylo Theatre’s Over the Garden Fence in which Annabelle comes to terms with her grandmother’s dementia.

The world of work can be just as fascinating. How did comedians Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams get on? Dreamshed Theatre explores their relationship in Seriously Funny, while in The Speech by Tony Earnshaw we watch a female PM struggling to preside over a series of disasters with the help of her speech writer.

Sometimes a twist of fate can change everything. A Yorkshire cricket umpire has a massive lottery win in Godfrey’s Last Stand by Talking Stock Productions while the life choices of three characters are examined in First Class by Aulos Productions & Relief Theatre. Meanwhile Phillipa & Will Are Now in a Relationship, part of a double bill from Freerange, creates a kind of Romeo and Juliet for the Facebook age, and Boy on a Bed from Organised Chaos Productions explores the ramifications of a runner’s decision to pose for a painter with very different values.

There is a great deal of New Writing at the Fringe this year but also some works by classic authors – Uproot Theatre Company reworks Shakespeare with a two-man Coriolanus, Sudden Impulse Theatre Company presents Stephen Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s In The Penal Colony and Sudden Impulse Theatre offers Dario Fo’s class-based farce One Was Nude and One Wore Tails.

Fringe chair Keith Savage adds: “It’s fantastic to see so much theatre on the Fringe and the sheer range of it is second to none.”

The Fringe wishes to thank its sponsor The University of Derby as well as financial supporters The Osborne Group and High Peak Borough Council, its Fringe Friends and the town’s many Fringe supporters and venues.

NOTE TO PRESS

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