Hello all! Lots of news at this end, re the online and offline shows, rehearsals, paperwork, plans and changes for the future. Everything is as positive as can be expected in these crazy Covid-times. 

Midsummer Night's Dream (Live shows) 
I apologise for the radio silence on this. This is a reiteration that the live shows will most definitely happen, however long it take, and a HUGE thank you to all cast and crew and venues for sticking together. At the moment we are looking, with lots of hope and wishful thinking, for an autumn run. This will be dependent on safety and legality at the time. We would look to have at least a month’s notice so that we can rehearse, and get things ready, quite intensively, for the shows at our full usual standard. As the shows WILL happen when it is safe to do so, we are asking all cast and crew to remain familiar with their lines and characterisations, as there is not likely to be time for "re-learning" when we are able to get the shows back; I find remaining familiar just involves a good focussed read and run over my lines once a week. When we get to live rehearsals with the final dates for shows, those rehearsals will need to be intensive logistics, blocking, and tech,. Lines etc will need to be already known. There will not be a performance at Brixham Theatre, as Brixham Theatre is remaining closed until Jan 2021, due to the pandemic, as the theatre needs several months marketing ahead of time and has very high local demographics of older people who need to isolate even more than the rest of us. I am however looking at alternative venues in Torbay. 
In addition at least one of the live performances (I am aiming for the Bristol one) will be live streamed to audiences who still prefer to isolate. 


Jack The Ripper (Live shows)
This show is going ahead. We are casting as planned this summer (although through the use of self-tapes instead of "in person" auditions, though an audition over Zoom or Facebook call can be arranged if someone feels unable to video their audition.). Initial rehearsals will be online, over Zoom. 
The performances are likely to be moved to late January 2021 (discussions taking place over the next weeks), when most surviving theatres, as is currently thought, will reopen. We will also be doing a live streamed online performance in the meantime, and again, one of the venue performances will also be streamed to those who may still be isolating. We are not casting "online only" actors for this show, as we want to be able to present the same actors to all audiences, on and offline.  We would love to hear from regular and new actors who would like to be considered for a role (all the details are over on the auditions page.) 

Further shows
The 2021 programme of live shows, all being well, is fully planned, and may tip over into early 2022. There is a very exciting line-up of work, including more Shakespeare (which is already booked in for the 2021 Bristol Shakespeare Festival) and historical dramas. These will be announced formally once there is more clarity on the Covid-affected timing of the current shows. 

Rehearsals
Later in July, our rehearsal venue will be available for limited use under current official guidelines. We hope to return by the beginning of August. There will be stringent safety (distancing, cleanliness) guidelines in place which will be mandatory to be followed for anyone attending. We have currently sent these to Equity for checking, and will have a finalised safety document outlining safety procedures which everyone will be required to follow, before we confirm a return to any physical rehearsal space. 
We would like to be very clear that even when this return happens, attendance at the physical space will be optional. Any cast member not wishing to attend in person for any reason, will instead be able to attend the rehearsal from their own home, over Zoom. Physical attendance at rehearsals will become mandatory again, when it is fully safe to do so and we are in the final stages of getting back to live touring (for blocking etc). As long as full attendance happens, whether physical or online, at rehearsals, then we are happy! 

The main rehearsal dates for our main shows remain the same; Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Where shows overlap there may be one show being rehearsed on one day, and one on the other. 

Until we are able to return to physical rehearsals in full force, any trainee/first-timer crew roles will have to either be postponed, or take place solely online.

For the time being we will not be able to accept guests at physical rehearsals. Due to space being at a premium with social distancing, only actors and senior crew involved in the scenes being rehearsed will be able to attend. Family members or friends who are not in the production, will not be able to come and "sit in".


COVID Online Season
We are in the final stages of planning the show line-up for a season of online Zoom-based "Virtual theatre" which will be live streamed to audiences during the autumn, with a wonderful mixture of new and established shows. We already have a wonderful Shakespeare production being planned, and a piece of new writing by a guest author who normally works in the Broadway circuit and is very excited to expand her work over to the UK. Following a call for new work, we are also reading through a number of other very exciting submissions, to select one or two, for the season. Casting calls for all available roles will be released as soon as possible, in line with our usual profit share & portfolio content line-up. Rehearsal times for these may vary from our usual times. 

Stage fighters
It should be noted that we have updated the policy document pertaining to fight choreography and weapons use, in order to clarify best practice and our expectations. It can be found in our governance documents. With the upcoming two year programme of shows involving a high percentage of shows with action and fight scenes, it was deemed important to re-clarify.

Training Zone
We often have people join our team who are new to professional acting, who may have come from either an amateur background or indeed who have never performed before. Even for those us who have been performing for 20 or 30 years, you never ever stop learning. All levels of experience are equally welcome, however we have often found a huge discrepancy in expectations of professional theatre, which unfortunately can, without any negative intentions from anyone, create friction. In an ideal world with the relevant funding and qualified personnel, we would run free training classes at our rehearsal hall, however this is not currently possible, and therefore we have opened the Training Zone on Facebook, which all of our cast and crew who own a Facebook account, regardless of experience, will be asked to join from Jack The Ripper onwards, where we can share learning, best practice, and help with questions or skills gaps. After all, we pride ourselves on having some of the best raw talent in Devon, and making sure that we are all as finely honed performers and crew as possible, will serve to build everyone's individual careers, and the team as a whole. The Training Zone group can be found here. If you have a question, however basic or advanced, this is the best place to ask and discuss, and find resources.
For those people not on Facebook, we will forward the contents into emails.

Skills assessments
From this point on, for the first six months with the company, new personnel will be required to complete monthly skills assessments with one of our senior staff. After six months satisfactory completion, new team members will be reviewed 6mts later, then, as with all of our team, will be reviewed on an annual basis. This will allow us to focus on continuous development of everyone working with us.

Market Stall, Ebay & Friends’ Scheme
With Brixham Pannier Market reopening later this month, we are reopening our book stall at the market on Wednesdays. This will have our usual wide variety of fiction and factual books, with new books added each week. The market takes place in the Scala Hall, part of the Brixham Town Hall complex, in the town centre by Bolton Cross.

We have also opened a dedicated Ebay store, which will sell donated items and any items that we are clearing out, to fundraise for the company. We will be re-launching our used-stamp appeal shortly as well. The ebay account is at https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/southdevonplayers.

“Friends Of” Scheme
Our ‘Friends of’ Scheme remains available. Full details on the website. Email southdevonplayers@gmail.com to sign up.

Child Actors
Following a spate of high-double-figures of highly concerning incidents of children contacting us without the knowledge of their parents for shows, providing dangerous amounts of personal information including secret contacts away from parents, and even requests for illegal trafficking from abroad (all of which have been reported to the child protection authorities in the relevant area to the child's residence, and anti-slavery organisations when from abroad), and incidents where parents have not been aware of chaperoning laws (in some cases being unaware even of the existence of such laws, let alone of the actual nuanced regulations and responsibilities), we have had to take the difficult decision to close our doors to child actors for the time being.
Dealing with these enquiries (sometimes two or three in one day) where children and parents are wilfully endangering children cause us huge amounts of worry & concern, it eats up hours of production time, from our small team, and we are unable to continue to cope without endangering our productions and company.

If we have shows or projects requiring child actors, we will contact a pool of three teenage actors with whom we have worked with this summer, who have established high-level professional skills & reliability, who will be invited to audition for any child roles that come up with new or peripheral projects.  For anyone who wishes to read our child protection policy, which remains in force as a non-negotiable production document and regularly updated in line with new legislation, the document may be found in our governance documents section. 

It should be noted that the coming two year forecast of shows after A Midsummer Night's Dream, (which is already cast as of Feb 2020, with two child actors involved) will not require child actors. 

If local child actors wish to find alternative opportunities, we highly recommend Dramatically Different youth theatre run by the lovely Rachel Swain as an excellent practical team for children and teens, which works towards two full-scale productions per year in Brixham Theatre, as well as other local events, or alternatively, on a wider scale, you may wish to look at the Young Company at Plymouth Theatre Royal.
 

The South Devon Players Theatre & Film Company responding to DCMS's call for input on the Impact of Covid-19 on DCMS sectors




Organisation summary:
The South Devon Players Theatre & Film Company is a small, but growing, female/ mixed-race-led touring theatre company based in Torbay, in South Devon, England. Founded in the winter of 2005/6, the Players was formed by local actors, to create world class performance opportunities for professionals and aspiring professionals, in the region, as a response to a local lack of opportunity for careers in theatre for local people. Welcoming performers and crew of all races/genders/sexualities/religions etc, equally, the company has won a number of local, national and international theatre awards.

1. Immediate impact of COVID
   

The most immediate effect was the suddenness of the pandemic, resulting in an almost complete disruption to plans for performances and rehearsals. Social distancing regulations and the lockdown mean that it is impossible to meet to rehearse, and also impossible to put on shows to physical audiences. To elaborate, we have found that performances have to be booked at performance venues; eg theatres, 12 – 18 months in advance. We also need several weeks to cast, rehearse and prepare our productions before that, and 6 – 24 weeks to market the shows to potential audiences.
Solution: We had to decide very quickly whether to close, or whether to explore more creative solutions for interim survival. Within our organisation we decided to embrace digital technology to survive, and are remaining active with productions which are cast, rehearsed and performed solely online with the actors working from home using video conferencing software, and streamed on our website and social media platforms, using ticketed links to earn ticket sale income for the actors.
Issues we have encountered have included:
A) No access to external technical assistance; we all had to teach ourselves, and help those team members less confident with technology.
B) Relying on peoples home equipment and internet connections. In a very low income area, meaning that people are using old second hand equipment, with known slower or non-existent internet speeds in some areas of Devon, this resulted in a number of unavoidable technical difficulties, namely 3gb upload of a performance to our website taking over 12 hours (May 30th 2020 in Brixham, despite the new fibreoptic cables laid in the area).
C) Lower spending power of audiences due to job losses or furloughs resulting in lower ticket sales.
D) Illegal foreign streaming website targetting our show and streaming it on their site without permission or recompense. (No response from official copyright authorities when we reported this, though finally managed to get the hosting company of the illegal streaming site to remove the video).
Requests for assistance to relevant departments, organisations, or funding bodies, with regard to all these issues have gone unanswered.

1. How effective has support from DCMS, other government departments and “arms length” organisations addressed the sectors needs?
   

There is no other war, from our view, to express this feeling other than sheer abandonment. We have been unaware of any support given by DCMS or government departments. A few of our more established actors, who have been self employed for longer, have been able to access the self employment support scheme, but many others, newer to the industry, have not. For us and other organisations, one may read daily how theatres and theatre companies, from the largest to the smallest, cannot hope to survive without significant assistance. And while theatre & performance may be seen as frivolous and unimportant, there are a large number of academic studies which show how important culture and entertainment is to peoples health, well-being, education, personal work skills, sense of community, and a myriad of other positive outcomes, for both audience and participants, that stretch far beyond the concept of a simple “frivolous night at the theatre”.
As an organisation, and despite having a strong fundraising team, we have applied for various grants for short and long term assistance, and barely had any response at all (none positive). From our observations, the assistance has either gone to large organisations, or to voluntary organisations only, leaving those of us who do not fall into one of those extremes, with absolutely nothing other than to try to survive by our own devices.
This is not entirely new. We have found that long term there are a number of clear misconceptions about theatre companies such as ours, namely that regional/ rural based theatre is “all amateur” (we encounter a lot of surprise when we challenge this misconception, usually surrounding surprised exclamations of “but you are local!” or “you are not based in a city!”). We also find a great deal of wariness in all sectors of society, of theatre that is led by a woman, and even more so that it is led by a woman of mixed race heritage. In an experiment, in 2015, we fronted a marketing campaign with a person of white heritage, and found positive response to first contacts, increased by an additional 50%.

Due to these aspects we have always found ourselves pushed to “the back of the queue”, and despite a huge international following for our work (evidenced social media following around 22,000), and local, national and international awards, there is no actual support, funding, or advice available.
We have been completely reliant on our own devices to survive, since all enquiries for information, or appeals for assistance, have been either unanswered or turned down.

1. The likely long term impacts of COVID on the sector will affect all aspects of creating theatre. In general terms, as already stated, it can take 12 – 18 months to book shows into theatre venues. These venues need to know that they will have survived and be able to reopen. 2 – 6 months is needed for marketing these shows. There is likely to be a fall in numbers of audience; many theatre audience members who are in “at risk” groups due to age, or health, will understandably have less confidence about returning to a crowded indoor venue. Theatre auditoria are not places where it is possible to socially distance – a regular theatre that we attend, of 240 seats, would be reduced to around 16 seats in order to allow for social distancing, and neither the venue, or the theatre company, can afford to run an unsubsidised event on only 16 ticket sales, with any hope of survival.
   

Backstage areas in theatres, and dressing rooms, tend to be quite cramped busy places, there is no way that a cast would be able to keep a two metre distance apart.
This situation can only be remedied by a vaccine or other highly reliable treatment for COVID, meaning that the distancing is no longer necessary.
On a positive side, it has temporarily forced organisations, especially those in our position, to be very creative, or learn new ways of creating work, to survive. For example, our choice to work online, has resulted in the creation of new approaches to delivering our work to audiences, and in a post-Covid world, will mean that we are able to livestream our shows to people not able to physically attend our performance venues.

1. Lessons to be learned. Nobody could have foreseen this pandemic, and it has harshly illustrated how fragile the theatre industry is. It has been hard – in many cases impossible – to find official information for our sector; and what there is, has usually been passed around by word of mouth between practitioners personal networks, or via trade unions; eg Equity. Regional performance companies seem to have been largely ignored (see previous comments), and even now, while there is some guidance appearing for film and TV productions, there is nothing out there for theatres; certainly nothing that is backed up with credible information or assistance. Most actors, and stage crew are out of work.
   

There is not a central network of information, funding, guidance, etc which can be accessed by all organisations or practitioners in the theatre sector.

1. In the future, new ways of working will need to grow from this situation; identifying, challenging and rectifying outdated marginalisational stereotypes, and developing a more co-ordinated, robust, central system where organisations could locate information and potential assistance; maybe a national directory of venues and performance companies – and those who rely on them – and emailing list for national information relating to the industry.   
   

Rehearsals are coming along amazingly with the team - here are a few shots of the rehearsal from Sunday :) 

This has been a hard piece to write. We are a theatre company based in South Devon, UK; an area which is not very diverse. If you look at our production photos you will see a huge majority, bar a very few faces, of white, British people. That is not down to company policy, that is simply down to local demographics, as to who has walked through the door. 

We would love to reach out and welcome more people of diverse origins. Not to be a "token person", we dont believe in that, but to reach out with the assurance that we are a team who actively WANTS to welcome people of all backgrounds to work together equally in a diveristy-positive creative team.  Our policies state very clearly that we are very strict about equal opportunities, and a safe space; however there can be a wide gap between words, and actually doing. 

In reality, we are founded and led by a mixed-race woman. It is not uncommon for her to be the only person who isnt "fully white" in the companys productions. Her life experience living in the area, is that she had never even seen another person who was not white until she was around 11 or 12 years old. However, race, colour and origin (or sexuality, gender, religion etc)  has never mattered within our team. We welcome people of all backgrounds, and a core tenet is that we are a safe, respectful place for everyone, in which everyone is equal, and where bullying, harrassment or other negative behaviour, on ANY pretext, is not permitted. 

EVERYONE, regardless of skin colour, should be equally respected and have equally good opportunities, and good performance roles, without being cast into negative stereotypes. EVERYONE, regardless of skin colour, should be working in a safe, positive space where they are equally respected, not treated in line with negative stereotyping.  Things like blackfacing/whitefacing, are not permitted within the company. 

In short, there is no space for racial prejudice within our company. 

We would like to invite any black-  or other ethnicity - actors or crew, to contact us to work with us, or discuss further, with full confidence of fair and equal treatment in an organisation where you are a person, not a stereotype, regardless of demographic. 

Good morning all. It has come to our notice that a streaming website named LiveABC, has been illegally downloading and streaming our recent online performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

IMPORTANT-
If you are watching or accessing this show please ensure it is accessed via our official www.southdevonplayers.com page provided to purchasers of the show tickets.
-
Aside from this other site downloading and streaming our copyright content without our permission, which in itself is illegal, the fact that we created this online show to help our actors and crew earn some money to survive in this lockdown, and the fact that this website has seen fit to just steal everyone’s hard work with no recompense let alone permission , to our team, has absolutely horrified us.
Legal, and Union advice is being taken on this matter, and the Police have been informed.

Anyone with any questions is asked to contact is at once on southdevonplayers@gmail.com

(Note: the screenshots below relate to, and show, the unauthorised/ illegal stream)

For more information and to book: ​https://www.southdevonplayers.com/box-office.html

Internationally award-winning Brixham theatre company brings Shakespeare's classic Midsummer Night's Dream to life, defying lockdown in an international, online performance, with actors performing from their homes.
“The course of true love never did run smooth ”
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1 scene 1



Shakespeare's classic comedy, is brought to life in a lockdown production, by a theatre company based in Brixham, South Devon.
Already in rehearsals for the live shows, with a national tour being booked for the live shows, when the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, caused postponement and cancellation of live shows for several months, for every theatre in the UK. Of course, many theatres, both venues and production companies had no choice but to close, and work for professional actors temporarily collapsed.
The South Devon Players decided to resist the trend, and as well as postponing (not cancelling!) the usual shows to such time as when it is safe for theatre venues to reopen, the Players decided to create online performances, in which the actors come together to perform online from the safety of their own homes. This in itself has not been easy, as many people in the team, have had to learn new technology & software, and find ways to make it work on household electronics, with the cast and crew working from their lockdown locations mainly in south Devon but also sheltering in place spread across the UK, as well as the Republic of Ireland, and Los Angeles in California.
The first of these online performances, is a full length, costumed production of William Shakespeare's classic romantic comedy; A Midsummer Night's Dream. Keeping as close as is possible to the originally planned steampunk styling of the live shows, the members of the team are dilligently rehearsing and learning software online, creating costumes and makeup styles, to create this show, and develop an entirely new way to present theatre using modern technology during this time.
Following this first performance, the Players are also planning further online shows, performing Shakspeare and other classic dramas, in the same way.
The South Devon Players Theatre and Film Company, are developing a proud history of Shakespeare productions, as part of their focus on historical and classical dramas. In 2019, their production of Macbeth, was booked for a second tour and won an international theatre award in New York for its professionalism and creativity. Laura Jury, the director of that production of Macbeth, & many of the Player's shows, and founder of the theatre company, has returned to lead this new project. Laura has also recently been selected to appear in an online Shakespeare project by the Globe Theatre in London. The South Devon Players were founded in the winter of 2005-6, on the proceeds of a carboot sale, to create professional opportunities for local actors, and has flourished ever since; previously winning national and regional arts awards, including the national Epic Award 2017 for England, a national arts award celebrating creativity and innovation in grassroots arts. Based in Brixham, the Players primarily specialise in researched historical theatre productions and old “Classics”.



William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream will be broadcast on the evening of May 30th 2020, as a ticketed event online, with tickets costing £5 each. All details on how to book tickets, and receive the online viewing links, are available at the company's website www.southdevonplayers.com.
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