We’ve played next to loudspeakers, in muddy fields, in thunderstorms and in heatwaves but still, like our audiences, we come back for more! Bringing to life the on and off stage personae of the hapless Victorian travelling players as Hardcastle’s Mighty Excelsior Theatre Company we present for 2011:
Hardcastle's Mighty Excelsior Theatre Company is on the road once more with their portable theatre which, like them, has seen better days. This time, they’re staging Mr Sudbury Spoone's version of the legend of the Bargeest, a horrific hound that lurks in the rocky chasm of Troller's Ghyll in Wharfedale. With its shaggy yellow coat, huge, saucer-like eyes, and sulphurous stench, it was reputed to prey on unwary travellers who passed that way at night. The tale was the inspiration for Mr Conan Doyle's "Hound of the Baskervilles", but of course, that tale is vastly inferior to Mr Spoone’s shocking masterpiece.
The problem is: the company have been very short of rehearsal time, what with sundry detentions at Her Majesty’s pleasure and Spoone’s overly prolonged writer’s block.
We are thus allowed a rare glimpse of the company’s rather unusual rehearsal process before witnessing the first performance of this epic Victorian melodrama. Unfortunately, as ever, the production is beset with problems from the start, and the cast’s efforts to extricate themselves from the mess forms the basis of this 45 minute piece of comic mayhem.
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