Village Pub Theatre’s Autumn Season
VPT returns – with a vengeance
By Thom Dibdin
Halloween hell-raisers and thrilling tweet plays are on the menu as Edinburgh’s Village Pub Theatre announces its first ever Autumn Season.
The season opens next week (Friday 11 Oct), with a new Tweet Play collaboration with the Royal Lyceum and continues with a halloween special, a Leith-themed evening and a three-evening Christmas special.
James Ley, Playwright and VPT founder, told Æ: “We’ve been astonished and delighted by the support and recognition Village Pub Theatre has received since we started.
“The launch of this mini season is aimed at keeping that energy going and maintain what people love about us – great themes to challenge our writers and entertain our audience – all from the comfort and warmth of the Village pub.”
Based at the Village pub on Leith’s South Fort Street, VPT was born during the 2012 Leith Festival as a pop-up theatre and continues to put down roots in Leith as the part of the wider emerging arts and cultural scene.
Formed by a loose collective of writers, VPT’s ambition is to is to provide quality, new-writing fringe theatre at the Village and a forum for its writers to put on new plays.
The autumn season’s opening event follows on from the hugely successful #vpt Tweet Plays this May, which challenged people to write a whole play in a tweet. Now, in collaboration with the Royal Lyceum Theatre, VPT will be challenging twitter users to write crime thriller tweet plays, to be performed on the Lyceum stage immediately before the performance of Dark Road on Friday 11 October.
Full details of how to get involved and more about the theme will be published online here at All Edinburgh Theatre later today, Friday 4 October 2013.
Push at bigger institutions, governments and organisations
Next up, last year’s Spooky Shorts is back on the menu on Halloween itself – along with the pumpkin pie which was praised as being “terrific” by Scotsman critic Joyce McMillan in her four star review of the evening. The brand new Halloween-themed plays being freshly penned for the evening will include a sequel to Catherine Grosevenor’s Brendan Bakes and Sophie Good’s tale of cold cuts: Ham.
On November 28, VPT steps into new territory with All Empires Fall, You Just Need to Know Where to Push. This is a provocation to the VPT playwrights to write short dramas for Leith that put this saying into a local, national or global context. The intention is to get the writers to explore their own power to push at bigger institutions, governments and organisations through their writing.
In December, the not-quite so imaginatively-titled Village Pub Theatre Christmas Show will run for three nights from Tuesday 17th to Thursday 19th. Co-written by the Village Pub Theatre playwrights collective, VPT promise a fun and irreverent alternative to the other Christmas shows on offer in the region.
Village Pub Theatre Autumn Listings:
#VPT Tweet Plays Fri 11 Oct 2013 (7.15pm). The Royal Lyceum, Grindlay Street, 7.15pm. More details on Æ and follow @pubtheatre. Free to that night’s Dark Road ticket holders.
Spooky Shorts Thurs 31 Oct 2013 (doors 7.30pm, show 8pm) The Village, 16 South Fort Street, Leith, EH6 4DN £3 on the door. Reservations: 0131 478 7810
All Empires Fall, You Just Need to Know Where to Push Thurs 28 Nov 2013 (doors 7.30pm, show 8pm) The Village, 16 South Fort Street, Leith, EH6 4DN £3 on the door. Reservations: 0131 478 7810
Village Pub Theatre Christmas Show 17-19 Dec 2013. (doors 7.30pm, show 8pm) The Village, 16 South Fort Street, Leith, EH6 4DN £3 on the door. Reservations: 0131 478 7810
Villabe Pub Theatre on Twitter: @pubtheatre.
Village Pub Theatre on facebook: www.facebook.com/PubTheatre
ENDS
