Fantastic news! 
We would like to extend a HUGE thank you to the owners of local health food shop Oats ( <- please like their page!) who will be stocking our fundraising book stall, beginning during next week! 
Thank you so much to Oats for helping support our work! 
You can visit their website at https://www.oatsofbrixham.co.uk

We are sad to announce that today we, along with all other stall-holders, recieved the sudden news that after the pandemic, Brixham Pannier Market will not be reopening, as the local Brixham Town Council have decided to not renew the hire to the market. The Pannier Market was held in the market hall in the town hall complex, in Brixham Town Centre.
Over the past year, when able to open, it won a national award for it's support of local businesses, and was featured on ITV, for doing the same. 

Sadly there was no consultation with stall-holders when the Town Council decided to close it. 

This of course has negatively impacted quite a few local businesses, completely closing-down at least one, and for our company, has resulted in the end of our book stall, which fundraised for rehearsal space (in turn putting those funds into a local volunteer-run community centre), as well as providing a face-to-face place where people locally could find out about our work.
With the town having a higher-than-national-average demographic of older people who are often less familar with using the internet, having a face-to-face point of contact was invaluable, as well as the fundraising. 
 
Our existing stock of books (all of which had been donated)  will be sold off over the spring (ideally in bulk), and we will be focussing on different ventures, including building up our ebay shop, and, once it is fully safe to do so, arranging a point in town where people can come and meet us and find out about our work, once a week. 

Regardlless of how things have turned out, we cannot thank Shaun and Mark Kennard enough for all their hard work in trying to get that market running well, and for their support for all local businesses and organisations. Everyone at the market has made enduring friendships, which will continue into the future, but it is truly the end of an era. 

We will find new ways to fundraise and new ways to make ourselves accessible on a general face-to-face level in our local town, as we slowly come out of the pandemic. 

If anyone might be interested in acquiring three large crates of books (all subjects, fiction and non-fiction), please drop us a line southdevonplayers@gmail.com

We are working on #fundraising -yes some creative approaches- to prep for 2021 - because as soon as it is safe and viable, we will be back to the live #stage (in the meantime we will continue working on digital broadcast) Please pass to anyone willing to help!

Info on our fundraising at https://www.southdevonplayers.com/fundraising.html. 

Fundraising like this for some of the day to day core costs, allows us to support our actors and creatives as much as possible from the show ticket sales, as well as to improve equipment and costume/ prop/ set resources, to create higher quality, more creative shows, and to develop free educational resources. 

We are collecting used postage stamps to help fundraise for our theatre productions.
All used stamps (any age, or country of origin) are gratefully welcomed. 
The stamps are sorted and sold to stamp-collectors, which help raise invaluable funds for us. 

Every penny raised from this fundraising is used for
- sourcing props & costumes
-hire of rehearsal space (or Zoom subscriptions during Covid)
- printing show posters & flyers
- saving for & buying basic technical equipment
- insurances/ script copyright registrations

Please email us on southdevonplayers@gmail.com for a UK postal address to send the stamps to.
(while the covid pandemic is happening, we pop in at our usual shared rehearsal base less often, so it is 
easier to send direct to one of our team at the moment) This is an ongoing appeal with no end-time.
​
#SaveUKTheatre

Well, it has been a hugely busy autumn for us, and there are dozens of projects, discussions and plannings in the works. 

Halloween and a video project. 
For Hallloween, supported by Arts Council funding via Torbay Culture, we created Spooky Tales of Brixham, a series of short stories, told in the first person by actors playing Brixham ghosts, based on local folklore. It has gone remarkably well, with fantastic audience feedback. 

This side of Christmas, we have two more historical dramas, coming digitally, to our season of online productions  - tickets all on sale now: pop over to our box office page to book now. 

And in addition... 
We are also working with Ivybridge Community Arts on a local history production that they have created, 
planning ahead for further online theatre productions in the New Year (and as long as Covid nessecitates that we work online. Some very exciting projects are in various stages of planning, from castiing to being written, behind the scenes! 

Castings and auditions
We have had a number of casting enquiries recently. We currently have open castings for specific roles within our production of DH Lawrence's The Lost Girl, to complete the compliment of actors. Anyone wishing to audition for those roles, please visit our "auditions" page as we are accepting auditions for the next ten days or so for those roles. 

During December/January, the next big show auditions will be made live on the same site, and announced here in the news page as well as on our official company social media. 

We have recieved a number of enquiries this autumn seeking auditions and "have a go" acting roles in our shows, specifically for children. As announced back in the summer, and as stated on our website in the audtions page, we were forced to close our doors to accepting new child actors, for the time being, for a number of reasons, including repeated concerns that children working with us were not being correctly chaperoned by their parents, and a deluge of very bizarre social media requests (reported to the authorities) requesting us to illegally traffic children from a number of countries, to the UK. In the interests of everyones well-being, safety and legality, we ended up with no choice to close the doors to new child actors.  As always we reiterate;  we are not a childrens theatre company, although the majority of our shows are suitable viewing for all ages, and we do only cast child roles, where a child is specifically required for a role, which is not the case in every show. 

At the moment, with Covid, all auditions take place using self-tapes. We have found that email systems can be very sporadic in filing submitted auditions sent via file-transfer systems to different folders, including the spam folder. While we do our utmost to be vigilant and pick up the auditions, we are still concerned that some may slip through the net, which is not fair on everyones hard work, and therefore we are working on finding an accessible, easy system which allows for easier submission and more efficient casting director access. If you have sent a tape, but not had a response, please always check in with us. 

Leaving aside the current second lockdown; a question that we are commonly asked, usually two or three times a week, is why we have not returned to live "on-stage" theatre, when techincally, (outside of the lockdown) the government allow for it. 

Ticket sales.  - As a professional company, we rely on ticket and programme sales to pay our actor and crew. If, due to social distancing, audiences are cut to 20-30, there is no way that we can even hope to break even on the show, much less pay anyone. The only way in which this could be done, is to charge extortinate amounts per ticket - which would be unlikely to fill seats anyway. 

Distancing for cast and crew - The current advice that we have recieved from our Equity contact, is that actors have to be fully socially distanced from one another on stage, which means in turn that we cannot have a natural dramatic dynamic on stage. Furthermore, every actor has to have thier own dressing room (most venues cannot accomodate this), and live in a "bubble" of a hired hotel before, during and after the show - there is no way to afford this. (Also what about families, other work/ committments, etc?) 

Venues - Many venues are closed, due to the lack of viability in being open under these circumstances.

And while we are all looking forward to a safe return to the live stage, it needs to be safe for the actors, crews, audiences and venue staff alike; and viable. 

​Until then, all our work will take place online. 

The Friends of the South Devon Players

And we have a message to the Friends of The South Devon Players, a fundraising arm run by volunteers who support our work. 
​
This year did not launch things as planned - while we were planning for social events, and all sorts of "perks" for the membership, Covid, and our scramble to keep the company ticking over, knocked that on the head. 

We are however now looking at creatiing "zoom socials" where you will be able to join, socialise, chat, and meet some of the cast and crew. None of these are mandatory for anyone, but will be an option to remain in contact. 

We will also be looking at various other "digital" perks, until we can get back into the live spaces, and the original plans, with an emailed announcement soon. 

If you would like to support our company's  groundbreaking theatre work, and join the Friends, it is only £10 per year, and please pop over to the Supporters Trust .  Every penny raised goes into creating new theatre work; costumes, equipment, publicity materialls, venue hire - and when we get to that stage, union-pay-rates for our actors and crew. 

We were very sad to hear today, of the passing of someone who was a fantastic member of our team, Don Percival. A super actor, and for a while, the company treasurer, many years ago, before he moved from Brixham to a new life in Cambodia. We heard that he passed away peacefully last night. 
Don was not only a great member of the team, but an adventurous spirit. Aside from being an actor, he was also an amazing scuba-diver, and in  his youth a rguby player.  We explored the moors and discovered all new prehistoric carvings on a Cornish together. Don will be very sadly missed. 

Shows & Performance dates: 

Brixham - As you may have seen, most theatres have closed for the time being (our home venue Brixham Theatre is closed until May, as things stand). We have resceduled our performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream there for August (details now updated on our Box Office page). 

Brixham Brixfest - our excerpt performance of acts 2 & 3 of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Brixfest in May, is cancelled, as Brixfest, an annual festival celebrating local arts, culture and business itself is cancelled. We will be working with them to perform in 2021 - discussions have already commenced

Plymouth - We are planning to reschedule oour performance st Stoke Damerel Church in Plymouth also to August, but we are currently awaiting a reply from the churchwarden to discuss new dates. When this occurs, all tickets bought for the current date will be honoured, or can be refunded (no quibble), if the new date does not suit.

Bristol - We have discussed with Bristol Shakespeare Festival, who are working on the best case scenario to run still in July. Both the festival and the venue are very happy to have us, and so as things stand, this date will go ahead. If we are forced to postpone, we will postpone until later in August/ September, and then perform "under our own steam". 

We are also exploring the possibility of online broadcasts and readings/ performances. 

Rehearsals: 
The vast majority of our rehearsals have now moved online, to protect the health of our actiors and crew;  using the video-conferencing programm / app, Zoom. Cast and crew should stay in regular contact via email or Facebook with the team, as we send the conference links out to everyone on a twice-weekly basis, and send out updates about online work opportunities for actors for our team. 

​Castings for Jack the Ripper
Our audition date in late July, remains as-is. We hope that the worst of the crisis will be over by then, but if it is not, we will be looking at alternate ways to cast the show and send out scripts etc to cast. Please keep an eye on our news, social media and the auditions page for any updates. People who have emailed us will be updated as well. 


Making online work
In this current crisis, most work for actors and crew has dried up - even big TV series and film shoots have cancelled. This leaves the nations entertainers unable to pay rent or the bills. We are doing our best to help our team with creating various online work opportunities. All we can do is but try, and do our best, rather than giving up. 
Our first opportunity for our team is offering online tutoring for adults and children; chiefly in drama and English, but also in other subjects as well, by an expert team of creatives. We are in the process of setting up, but expect to have it done open for business by Sunday March 21st 2020. You can find it at ONLINE TUTORING SERVICE.  In the interim, if you would like to be contacted as soon as this service is live,  please email us on southdevonplayers@gmail.com. 
You or your loved ones will be able to access expert tutoring, and also support some of our nations entertainers and creatives, during this hard time. 

The South Devon Players Theatre & Film Company, in conjunction with the South Devon Players Supporters Trust are launching the next part of our fundraising drive, with the corporate sponsorship pack.  This is to raise funds for ongoing productions; expenditure includes rehearsal hall hire, costumes, props, printing of scripts & publicity materials, insurances, wages to cast & crew, provision of educational workshops & training. This supports the cultural work of our company, leading to the creation of educational experiences in theatre, literature and history, for our audiences & cast, as well as the development of both theatre-industry specific skills, and wider transferable skills for general employment and day-to-day life, for those working with us. 

For more information; or to chat about this project, please contact southdevonplayers@gmail.com, or call Laura on 07855 090589