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A series of world premieres begins this week at the Theatre Royal in Dumfries with the launch of an exciting initiative combining theatre, poetry and great conversation.
A Play, A Poet & A Pastry will see Andrew Byatt and Gavin Jon Wright take to the stage on Friday, September 29, for the first ever performance of The Square Mile/Y Filltir Sgwar by award-winning Glasgow-based playwright Andrew Edwards.
A whole extra dimension will be added when Dumfries and Galloway-based poet Liz Niven presents brand new work written in response to the play.
And the third part of the evening will see the audience join Andrew, Gavin and Liz for a discussion over super pastries courtesy of the Marchbank Bakery.
Gavin Jon Wright
Ali Anderson-Dyer, Director and co-founder of the event’s producers Bunbury Banter, said:“This is such an exciting project – and a real first for Dumfries. Over the coming months we will be presenting a series of world premieres at the Theatre Royal, along with poetry and lively conversation.
“It’s thrilling to start with a play by an exciting young talent like Andrew and we are very pleased to have been able to get actors of the calibre of Andrew and Jon as our performers.
“It will be fascinating to hear the poetry that Liz creates in response to the play. And we hope that the audience will love the chance to join them all for some lively discussion afterwards.”
Gavin will be familiar to Dumfries audiences, having previously appeared at the 2012 panto at DG One. He has also appeared in a variety of TV shows including In Plain Sight, Taggart, Still Game, Shetland, Lip Service and Dear Green Place.
He said:“I had a great time the last time I was in Dumfries and am really looking forward to being part of the very first Play, Poet and Pastry event.”
Liz Niven
This year Andrew won the ART Award for emerging Scottish artists for his one act play Scribble which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Liz, who is based in Dumfries, is a widely published poet working in English and Scots.
The Square Mile/Y Filltir Sgwar is about the boundaries of home, about human roots and family relationships. Set around a kitchen table, in a rural house where England meets Wales, and where flatlands start rolling into mountains, it focuses on a father and son – Dylan and Allan – and a struggle that lies ahead of them.
A Play, A Poet & A Pastry is a collaboration between Dumfries and Galloway’s Bunbury Banter Theatre Company and the Theatre Royal, with four bi-monthly events planned between September and the end of March.
Andy Edwards
Bunbury Banter, based in Thornhill, are specialists in new and experimental theatre. They have recently produced Blackout to much acclaim, worked with the National Theatre of Scotland on the Five-Minute Festival, and a web-based audio production called Mortar which starred Timothy West, Prunella Scales and Nichola McAuliffe.
Lyndsay Walker, Marketing and Communications Officer for the Theatre Royal, said: “We are delighted to be once again working alongside Bunbury Banter Theatre Company in their new venture, A Play, A Poet & A Pastry.
“We are confident that this new bi-monthly event will bring in fresh audiences to the theatre and, by offering the opportunity to watch new studio plays and take part in discussions, new writers and performers may be encouraged to develop their own work. We hope that this partnership with Bunbury Banter will continue into the future.”
A Play, A Poet & A Pastry involves the semi-staging of the plays. It is being supported by the Holywood Trust and DGU’s Regional Arts Fund.
Dates: Friday, 29 September 2017; Friday, 24th November 2017; Friday, 26th January 2018; Friday, 30th March 2018
Performance time: 7.30pm
Tickets: £12 (£10 concessions)
Approximate Length: two hours
Book online at theatreroyaldumfries.co.uk, and at Midsteeple Box Office on 01387 253383.
About the Director
Ali Anderson-Dyer has directed Blackout (Theatre Royal, Dumfries), Ego et Al (Hidden Door Festival 2017), Freedoms Cut (National Theatre of Scotland’s five Minute Festival), Moon On A Stick & Fancy Meeting You Here by Lisa Fulthorpe (Bunbury Banter), Rain Stops Play (Bunbury Banter, starring Timothy West and Prunella Scales) The Bonk (Bunbury Banter, starring Nichola McAuliffe), Handmaidens of Death (University of Hertfordshire), Memories of Loss (Riverside Studios), The Fastest Clock in the Universe by Philip Ridley (Battersea Arts Centre), Stiff (Rosemary Branch Theatre), Settled (Rosemary Branch Theatre) and Gaelic Storytelling; The Bravery of Love (St Mary’s University College).
About Bunbury Banter
Bunbury Banter’s artistic work combines the dynamic intensity of audio with the theatrical traditions and excitement, found in performance. Often working with new writing, the company also experiments with other forms of drama and storytelling, outside the realms of a theatre space. Recent work includes Blackout, by Davey Anderson, Freedoms’ Cut, a verbatim theatre piece for the National Theatre of Scotland Five Minute Festival; Mortar, a web-based audio experience which peaks behind the curtains of a shared townhouse in modern day Britain and shines a light on each inhabitant’s existence, starring Timothy West, Prunella Scales and Nichola McAuliffe; The Dark Outside, a site-specific transmission of select pieces of their past audio work in the UK’s first dark sky forest.
About Andrew Edwards
Andrew is a Glasgow-based playwright, dramaturg and artist making work for stages, galleries and digital spaces. His most recent play Scribble, a one-act play about gravity, anxiety and breakfast cereals, won the Assembly Roxy Theatre (ART) Award for emerging Scottish artists. Developed under Playwrights’ Studio Scotland’s mentoring programme, Scribble was performed at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Other recent work includes contributions to Nowhere (Dir. Andy Arnold, Take Me Somewhere Festival, Tron Theatre), The ground, The highest point (Emergency Festival, Z-Arts, Manchester) and the publication of talking dramaturgy: a zine.
Besides The Square Mile/Y Filltir Sgwar, Andy is currently developing two projects: In Burrows, a solo choreography about language, and JENNIFER, a quietly explosive performance about nouns.
About Liz Niven
Liz Niven’s poetry collections (Canongate then Luath) and pamphlets are in Scots and English. Titles include Stravaigin, Burning Whins and The Shard Box. She has collaborated with artists to locate text in public places as well as books such as ‘Anything you say’, a collaboration about the island of Barra with Tasmanian conceptual artist, Fiona Lee. She has held numerous writing residencies including one at Inverness Airport about which a documentary film was made entitled ‘Poet on a Plane’. Awards include McCash/Herald for Scots poetry, TESS/Saltire for groundbreaking work in Scots language and she has received several Scottish Arts Council/Creative Scotland awards for writing projects. She wrote the first Scots dossier for Mercator, European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages (2000) and its update (2017) and has written and edited a wide variety of education resources for the Scots language. Liz is an honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literature and an Executive Board member of Scottish PEN.
About Andrew Byatt
Andrew has done seasons at many theatres including the Lyceum Edinburgh and the National in London. He was creator and Artistic Director of the Scottish Actors Studio for 10 years producing hundreds of world class workshops and also Producer of the Scottish Film Actors and Writers Workshop for four years. He was Producer and co-founder of THEATRE PKF (Peace Keeping Force) with his playwright father George Byatt.
About Gavin Jon Wright
Other theatre credits have included work for Tron Theatre (Scenes Unseen, Miracle on 34 Parnie Street, Ulysses and The Lying Kind this summer), National Theatre of Scotland (Black Watch), Vox Motus/NTS (Dragon), Citizens’ Theatre (Trainspotting), Cumbernauld Theatre (Cinderella, Snow White, Potterrow), macRobert (The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Titus), Red Bridge Arts (Titus US Tours), Pitlochry Festival Theatre (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Whisky Galore – A Musical!, The Servant o Twa Maisters, The Life of Stuff), Grid Iron (Decky Does A Bronco), Grid Iron/Traverse (Spring Awakening), Traverse/59 East 59 New York (A Respectable Widow Takes to Vulgarity), Random Accomplice (News Just In) along with a number of shows at Oran Mor’s Play Pie Pint seasons. Television work includes In Plain Sight, Taggart, Still Game, Shetland, Lip Service & Dear Green Place.
A Play, A Poet & A Pastry will see Andrew Byatt and Gavin Jon Wright take to the stage on Friday, September 29, for the first ever performance of The Square Mile/Y Filltir Sgwar by award-winning Glasgow-based playwright Andrew Edwards.
