 |
|
|
|||
|
Interviews
|
|||
|
|
Waiting for more from Encore
Steve Orme speaks to James Parsons of Encore Theatre Company. One of the most enjoyable evenings I've spent so far this year was in the sumptuous Victorian family home of the famous Birmingham parliamentarian Joseph Chamberlain. Highbury is now a conference and banqueting centre but it welcomed a fledgling theatre company staging a fresh version of The Importance of Being Earnest. The acting, by members of the Encore Theatre Company, was superb. So who are the people behind Encore? The three board members of the company, also known as ETC, have different skills needed by all theatre companies. Creative and marketing director James Parsons has returned to the stage after a short break and used to run a youth theatre company in Hereford; human resources and training director Fleur Easom trained at Birmingham School of Acting and London Guildhall University, majoring in communications and audio-visual production; and artistic director Karen Crouch has more than ten years' experience as an actor, director, administrator and teacher. They'd worked together on various projects and came together late last summer, deciding to form an organisation which allowed them to take control of their own work. "What we wanted to do was to be able to decide our own direction, choose our own material and do more interesting and unusual things than we might get away with working for other organisations," James Parsons told me on the phone from the company's office in the Edgbaston district of Birmingham. Nurturing new talent"We have a number of aims. One is to develop and nurture new talent. In the production of Earnest we had a number of experienced professionals and we had a few people for whom this was their first professional gig. The idea is to bring those people up onto the professional circuit; and to provide a hothouse so that we can work with different directors and actors on different sorts of projects in different spaces. We want to be as wide-ranging as we feel we're comfortable with and be as challenging as we can be to ourselves and to other people." Having your own theatre company sounds idyllic but James is quick to knock down that perception: "I don't think we ever had any illusions. It was and still is a lot of hard work. "Putting on a show is not an easy thing to do. I think some of the people who were involved in the early stages didn't really appreciate just how much work there was going to be but most of us were pretty clued up about what we were taking on. "We were certainly not expecting to glide gracefully through our first production and inevitably there were hiccoughs and problems - but there would have been something seriously wrong if there hadn't been. "All the people involved still act outside the company, so we're still doing the mundane jobs that people have to do in order to make ends meet. But it allows us to come together and put on our own productions and have that degree of control over our work." The importance of choosing EarnestEncore chose Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest for their first production for a number of reasons, according to James: "It was a play we all liked, it's a play some of us have done before and it's a play you don't have to sell. It sells itself on the title alone - even if people have never seen it they know or they know of The Importance of Being Earnest without being bored or over-familiar with it. "It's a very portable play - you can take it into a variety of different spaces, it doesn't require hugely complex lighting or sets and it's a damn good play. "It's a very challenging play - it's very easy to make it rather dull and staid, and the last thing we wanted to be was dull. So it was picked because we knew it was going to be a challenge. But it was also one that we felt we could handle." At the moment Encore is operating out of necessity on a profit-sharing scheme. "One of the problems is that it's extremely difficult for a new company to get funding. So we had largely to bankroll Earnest but we can use that to move forward and actually get funding. The hope is eventually to be able to fund people's posts if only on a part-time basis." More than 400 people saw Earnest performed over seven nights at two venues, Highbury and Ragley Hall in Warwickshire. James describes the attendances as "fairly reasonable audiences and we did sell out on our last night which was I think beyond what any of us hoped we might achieve." How difficult was it attracting audiences to places which don't have a reputation for staging plays? "We wanted to go into unusual, different venues. I don't think the venues were a challenge. The challenge was marketing Earnest on not a very large budget." The FutureEncore's next project may be three linked one-act plays in the autumn. James says the company's future plans are much more ambitious: "We'd like eventually to be running three, four or five productions per season, with a number of different casts rehearsing at the same time. But that's a fairly long-term ambition and we have no illusions about how quickly that's going to be achieved." On the basis of all the hard work and dedication that went into The Importance of Being Earnest, Encore's vision may be realised much more quickly than they think.
|
||
|
|
