Clare College Actors

This year has seen Clare Actors build on its successes of last year, which saw us back at the ADC with Tom Stoppard's 'Travesties', with happily enjoyed old favourites and shiny new innovations.

We closed last year with the annual May Week show in the gardens. The Winter's Tale was, as we were often reminded, an unusual choice of show staged in June, but its tense early scenes clattered into exuberant, jingly celebration as rustics and peasants capered, possibly for the only ever time, around the college gardens. And a happy ending was had by all in the summer twilight, one of the best and most beautiful things about outdoor performance (the worst among them being an ambulance sirening past at the point of Hermione's death, and a repetitive MC at the Tit Hall (Trinity Hall) Event laying down some beats over Leontes' psychological disintergration). This year's May Week show promises to be even more successful, so be sure to be there or in it.

The Christmas pantomime, as expected, boasted more innuendos than a single stick could be shaken at, rendering, perhaps less expectedly, Milton's Paradise Lost with God as a dame and Satan as an all-singing, all-dancing heart-throb. It was especially pleasing to see Clare Actors' membership so swollen with new blood.                        

Also held, to great enjoyment, was the inaugural Miscellaneous Theatre Festival. Clare Actors, with encouragement and support from the Judith E Wilson Drama Studio and Clare Poetry, encouraged writers to submit their work for low-pressure performance, discussion and feedback. As a result, more new plays - albeit short pieces - occurred in Cambridge across three days than have been staged in the past three years. The Festival lived up to its name, allowing for the avant-garde, the absurdist, the realist, the cubist, and much, much more. It is hoped that the Festival's Clare Actors, and that the Cellars and the Studio will become well-used venues for performance and experiment in drama.

Any queries, questions or submissions should be sent to president@clareactors.com

For further information about Clare Actors here is a link to the website: www.clareactors.com

Back to Societies