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Interviews
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Richard Main- A New Chapter Steve Orme talks to Richard Main from Chapterhouse Theatre Company about their huge tour Putting on a total of 166 performances with 50 actors and musicians in four different shows sounds a daunting prospect. But Lincoln-based Chapterhouse Theatre Company have just started this mammoth enterprise which will promote their name the length and breadth of the country. Chapterhouse have been growing steadily over the past four years and this summer are presenting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Yasmina Reza's Art - reputedly the first West End show to tour in the open air - as well as its usual fare of two Shakespeare plays. More than 50,000 people are expected to see the four shows over two and a half months. The man behind the organisation is producer Richard Main, originally from South Shields but now settled in the East Midlands after a career as a musician and actor. He recognises what a huge job he's had preparing for the tour: "I don't know of any other company in the country that would be mad enough to take out four shows out at the same time. It's the largest we've ever done and I should think it's one of the largest things any touring company has done in the country." The coup for Chapterhouse is Art directed by Nigel Havers. The company's reputation had obviously spread to London, as Main explains: "We were approached by David Pugh, the original West End producer, to see if it would work and to try some thing new and we jumped at the chance. I think it's perfect for the open air. It's funny and it's got a lot of charm." The actors in Art were whittled down gradually through auditions in Lincoln and read-throughs in London with Pugh and Havers. Those taking part in the other shows are a mixture of newcomers and those returning to Chapterhouse. Hundreds of applications "It was a lot harder getting actors when the company first started than it is now," says Main. "We get hundreds of applications particularly from actors who are just starting out on their career. We get a lot of new people but of course now we get actors who want to come back and work for us year after year." This summer the two Shakespeare offerings are As You Like It and the perennial favourite A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Shakespeare under the stars is a wonderful thing and audiences really warm to it. As You Like It has some beautiful comic characters but some warm romance as well. It's a lovely rural play - when you're performing in gardens and you have a countryside backdrop, the play slots very nicely into that. "Dream of course has everything you could ever want, either indoor or outdoor. We've set it in the 1920s to give it a new spark. We've toured with it three times in Elizabethan costume so we've brought it forward to give it bite and edge." Evenings to remember Chapterhouse began by playing at a number of English Heritage sites. Now venues stage performances not only as a way of attracting paying customers to their venue but also to give something back to their regular visitors. Chapterhouse hope people will have an evening to remember. "We want them to have a long, relaxed evening with friends and if they see an entertaining play I think it's really special," says Main. "When you go to the theatre there's a lot of pressure to enjoy yourself because you pay a lot of money for a ticket. When you come to the open-air venues there's a whole ambience of its own which is wonderful." Even though this year's tour is under way, the work doesn't stop. Chapterhouse are already booking next year's productions and auditions will start in February. There is a possibility that Art may again be included on the itinerary. And they are considering whether to put on Dickensian evenings at country houses this Christmas. Whatever they put on, according to Main, they'll always stick to their principles of trying to stage "magical theatre in magical surroundings".
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