West Sussex-based TIMT Theatre Company will be going far and wide this spring with their double offering – The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum alongside their own version of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Always lovely
00:06 to speak to Ethan Taylor of This Is My Theatre. Now you're embarking on a fabulous sounding
00:11 show which starts at the end of the first week of May, goes through to the end of June.
00:15 You are going far and wide with two productions this spring, and they are The Wonderful Wizard
00:22 of Oz and Jane Austen's Persuasion. Why those two together?
00:27 Oh, well, we always like going out with a very family-friendly show. That's The Wonderful
00:31 Wizard of Oz, taking the adaptation from the book rather than the film. The film is lovely
00:35 and the classic that it is, but there's a lot that remains unearthed within the book
00:39 that we'll be bringing to life with lots of puppetry and live music as well. And then
00:46 we are also taking on the road Jane Austen's Persuasion, but we're bringing it to life
00:51 in our catastrophic, as we're calling it, manner. So it's too few actors and too many
00:57 roles. We will have three performers bringing to life close to 15 characters with a variety
01:03 of multi-rolling, hat-swapping and balancing of props, and presumably quite a bit of chaos
01:09 and farce.
01:10 Brilliant. But how much of Jane Austen remains in the production, would you say?
01:15 It's still very, very faithful to the original story. So yes, ardent Jane Austen fans can
01:19 come see it brought to life, the story that they know and love, but just in a slightly
01:24 unorthodox fashion, I'm going to say.
01:26 It sounds brilliant. The lovely thing for the company is your success means that you're
01:30 juggling lots of new venues, but also trying to keep happy your favourites, and you are
01:35 going far and wide at the same. It's a big tour, isn't it?
01:39 It is a big old tour. Yep. Running from the start of May, like you said, right through
01:43 to the end of June, we're Sussex-based, but we are going as far north at the minute as
01:48 Nottinghamshire, going out towards Wiltshire, and we're all over the place, including Kent,
01:53 Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, various other places in the Midlands, but it's lovely. And yeah,
01:59 as you mentioned, we've got a lot of lovely new venues with some wonderful people behind
02:02 them, but we're making sure we visit the people that we've been going to since they've died,
02:07 because they've been keeping us going.
02:08 And part of the reason for that success, as you were saying, is you're pretty transportable,
02:12 given that you are fairly low in numbers.
02:14 Yes, yeah, fairly low in numbers. We're a cast of four, and we rock up to any venue
02:19 with a band filled with cast, crew, and a lot of sets, generally. But yeah, we're there
02:26 for one night and one night only, usually, and yeah, it makes for a very special experience.
02:30 Fantastic. Well, it sounds brilliant. Good luck with all of it. Lovely to speak to you
02:34 again. Thank you.
02:35 Thank you, sir. Take care.