The Curtain Call Awards For Local Amateurs Show Theatre Is Thriving

The diversity of local amateur theatre is impressive. I counted twenty different groups honoured at the Awards. For me, this is a key audience for theatre. In any business, some of your customers will be evangelists who encourage others to use you. Amateur means someone who does something for the love and these performers and their audiences love theatre.

Not that the word ‘amateur’ is fair with its connotations of ‘amateurish’. I’ve been to many amateur performances where the drama or entertainment has been just as involving or uplifting as a professional one. One of the best moments I have ever experienced in a theatre was when an ‘amateur’ tenor sang White Cliffs Of Dover unaccompanied in an atmospheric half light. I didn’t see Showstoppers’ Curtain Call Award winning production of Jekyll & Hyde but I shall watch out for their next performance.

Just as the West End theatre is a key reason why tourists visit London rather than other European capitals, theatre is vital in attracting visitors and businesses to our local cities. The Nuffield Theatre’s impressive homegrown productions put Southampton’s name on the map as a city of culture. Further down the road, Chichester Festival Theatre is an advertisement for the city every time a production transfers to London. Enron was one of the best pieces of theatre I’ve seen and it will be forever associated in my mind with Chichester.

As a Winchester resident, my local is the Theatre Royal. It hosts mainly touring productions but its annual pantomime is a cut above the crowd and this year’s top quality Peter Pan drew over 16,000 people to the city. Admittedly any theatre manager who doesn’t deliver a successful panto should be sacked, but that is a remarkable figure for a tiny venue.

So why are we living in a golden age of theatre? Partly it’s the quality. If you provide cheap production values and lazy content, audiences stay home. When you look at the West End’s hits, they are challenging plays and intelligent musicals. The same is true at our successful local theatres. Even our amateur companies, once purveyors of easy potboilers, now stretch themselves and their audiences with works ranging from Pinter’s The Caretaker to Sondheim’s Company.

The main reason, I think, is to do with it being live. We’re all aware nowadays of how packaged and mass produced so much of what we consume is, including entertainment. Consequently, there’s an appetite for things that are or appear to be authentic. At one end of the spectrum, you see it in the popularity of ‘reality’ TV shows and a desire to see behind the celebrity masks. Elsewhere it’s the trend towards naturally produced food or, as I see in my shop, the demand for handmade products like Steiff bears and Dartington Glass. A theatrical performance, where we join a live audience to share in the real emotion communicated by actual people, is the organic wholemeal loaf of entertainment.

Whatever the reason for this golden age, it may soon be over. Cuts to arts funding are threatening many great producing theatres, local and national. So, enjoy it while you can.

Readers who submit articles must agree to our terms of use. The content is the sole responsibility of the contributor and is unmoderated. But we will react if anything that breaks the rules comes to our attention. If you wish to complain about this article, contact us here