Valley Theatre brings a year of performance, local writing and a little Dario Fo inspired irreverence to Hope Street.
Community theatre has always occupied an important place within Liverpool’s creative landscape, not least because it offers something that larger productions cannot always replicate: the opportunity for people to discover performance by actually doing it, working together and eventually taking that work in front of an audience. For Valley Theatre, based in Belle Vale and Netherley, that journey leads to Hope Street this October with A Moveable Feast, an evening which celebrates both the performers and the writing that have shaped another busy year.
Taking place at Hope Street Theatre on Tuesday 13 October as part of Liverpool Fringe, the production brings together some of the strongest pieces developed through Valley’s annual programme. Members of its Acting Up Theatre Performance Course will be at the centre of the evening, having spent the year developing their skills through rehearsal and performance rather than treating acting as something confined to the classroom.
Facilitator Tom McLennan describes the show as “the icing on the cake of a great year’s work”, and there is something rather fitting about Valley taking that work into Hope Street. The organisation has spent decades creating opportunities for people to participate in the arts, while retaining a particular enthusiasm for theatre and new writing. A Moveable Feast feels like an extension of that philosophy rather than simply an end-of-year showcase.
Local voices are prominent. Work by Dave Brown, Terri Pickering, Tim Hemmings, Rob Johnston and Andy Edwards appears across the programme, continuing Valley’s commitment to providing writers with somewhere for their words to move from page to performance. McLennan even contributes something himself, although The Raising of Lazarus takes its starting point from rather further afield.
Inspired by Italian dramatist Dario Fo’s treatment of the biblical story, McLennan is less interested in Hollywood spectacle than in the people who might have gathered around the tomb at Bethany. Fo imagined the crowd as earthy, recognisable individuals rather than reverential biblical extras; Valley takes that idea another step, bringing those characters forward into a world populated by the sort of people we might encounter at a modern-day public event.
It is an approach that seems particularly suited to community theatre. Strip away the grandeur and what remains are people watching something extraordinary happen — talking, reacting, doubting and behaving, presumably, very much like people.
A short scene from John Godber’s Perfect Pitch adds another comic ingredient to an evening which deliberately moves between different writers, styles and moods. That variety also explains the title: this isn’t a conventional single-play production but a selection, assembled from a year spent making theatre.
At £8 a ticket — £7 concessions — it is also an accessible opportunity to see what has been happening away from the city’s larger stages.
A Moveable Feast may represent the end of Valley Theatre’s programme for this particular group of performers, but bringing the work into Hope Street also gives it another beginning: a different stage, a new audience and one more chance for Liverpool’s community theatre makers and writers to be heard.
A Moveable Feast
Tuesday 13 October, 7.30pm
Hope Street Theatre
Tickets
