Songkeeper – Brightlight Theatre Co October 2024
In March this year (2024) I auditioned for, and won, a part in a 1-act, 2-man play (“Songkeeper”). This would be Brightlight Theatre’s ninth consecutive entry in the Woking Drama Festival. That’s a yearly competition for the region’s amateur theatre companies.
Liam Badcoe and I rehearsed hard with a team of puppeteers for six months. I had to grow my hair & beard ‘negligently long’ to suit my role. I play Provolov, a blind-since-birth mariner, in his early eighties. He’s also a grieving widower who has ‘let himself go’. The rehearsals were tiring but fun, though I did not enjoy the growing irritation of long hair.
As a dry run, we performed the play in the Login Lounge, Camberley, on 24th September. I am truly grateful for all my friends, family and church members who came to support us. They numbered ten among the audience of around 60. To Brightlight’s delight, the show went down well. The audience laughed in all the right places, gasped at the dramatic bits, and raised the roof at the end. Of the feedback I received from my own supporters, I remember only certain words. “Powerful”. “Poignant”. “Heart-wrenching”. But my favourite was: “I cried during the ending”.
An aside. We donated all our takings for that performance, over £250, to Bigleaf Foundation. This charity deals with the theme of our play: the perils suffered by young immigrants.
But more to the point, Brightlight learned a lot of useful lessons that evening. This helped put us in good shape for the competition.
We competed on 9th October in the Rhoda McGaw theatre, Woking. Even more of my friends & family turned out to watch it. Brightlight’s aim was simply to earn a ‘recall’. In all the previous years of competing at Woking, we’d never received one.
Another aside. A recall is where a company is invited (at short notice) to perform their piece again at the Gala & Awards Night. It doesn’t affect any scores or awards; it’s just for the enjoyment & privilege.
But that was for later. Back to the present. After the evening’s competing performances ended, we all took our seats. We steeled ourselves for Chris Jaeger, MBE, to give his adjudicator’s speech. To our amazed delight, he was enormously encouraging and flattering about Brightlight’s performance.
Not a single criticism!
He spoke at length too, and positively, about my portrayal of Provolov. I remember that much. But, once he concluded, all I could remember were his last two words: “towering performance”. Personally, I am used to receiving constructive criticism only. I note it carefully to work on later. But there was nothing to note! I could not take it in, and had to listen to it, days later, from a recording.
The competition worked through seven more days of performances. Time passed by slowly. Meanwhile, our cast’s WhatsApp group buzzed with anxious conversations every moment. Each message focused on one issue: had we done enough to secure our recall? Not only the 65th drama festival at Woking, this was also the last.
This would be our final chance.
The evening of Friday 18th October finally(!) arrived. Clock hands seemingly crawled towards 10pm. At this appointed time we received news of the decision. We had succeeded! Brightlight Theatre had won the second of two performance slots. … We had the sad, but signal honour, of performing the last-ever play for this long-running drama festival.
We were ecstatic, and WhatsApp must have come close to a melt down that night, handling all our chatter!
We were emboldened by the adjudicator’s feedback and buoyed by our much-coveted ‘recall’. Thus Brightlight Theatre Company performed ‘Songkeeper’ one last time on Saturday 19th October. And again, the turn out of friends and family who came to watch it amazed & pleased me. The audience reacted as well as before. Laughs in the right places. Murmurs of appreciation as we made a whale appear. But the loud gasp at the death of a puppet character was a proud moment for us all.
Finally, it was time for the awards and we took our seats. Being selected for a recall, we were sure of nabbing a few awards. Maybe three, the best we’d ever achieved in previous competitions. But, as they were announced, it was Brightlight Theatre that kept being invited onto the stage to collect … SIX AWARDS! We were dazed.
Here’s the list ….
* A well-deserved nomination for our puppetry team
* Best Back Stage Team
* Best Lighting
* Best New Play (Brightlight’s Artistic Director, Jamie Lakritz, wrote the script)
* Best Actor : uh … ME?!!!
* Best Actor : my co-star, Liam. What?! (See below.)
AND …….
BEST PLAY OVERALL — First place!
Giving awards to TWO Best Actors is incredibly rare; it’s almost unheard of. And yet the Guild Of Drama Adjudicators’ rules allow for this possibility … PROVIDED the actors are in the same production … AND they performed equally well.
There was one more piece of good news. Brightlight Theatre are through to the finals in Coventry’s National Drama Festival! This will take place on 17—20th July 2025.
Details will soon appear on https://ndfa.co.uk/
I am writing this article days afterwards, on Tuesday 22nd October. Despite the passage of time, I still have difficulty taking it all in. But I do at least understand that I must grow my hair & beard out again for the finals. I hereby apologise for this to Heather and all members, in advance.
