Little Women is in Manchester, The Maggie Wall toured the Highlands, Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape went to Edinburgh and Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood headed south to St Albans
Here at Pitlochry Festival Theatre we create and stage a host of productions each season. And co-productions are an integral part of this programme, giving us the opportunity to send our shows out to other UK theatres, as well as giving us the chance to work with creative contemporaries from near and far.
As the largest producing theatre in Scotland we have an in-house workshop and a team of carpenters to build the sets and technicians to meticulously coordinate the sound and lighting. When our shows go on the road, the costumes created by our wardrobe team are carefully wrapped up and sent on with the show props. We also share relevant marketing content created for the show, from programmes and posters, to social media posts and trailers. Our partnerships with co-producers mean that theatres of different scales and sizes can work with us to create and stage world-class shows ensuring audiences from all over the UK have the opportunity to share the experience of live theatre together.
Little Women
About to start its festive run, our production of Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women opens on 8 December at HOME in Manchester. Starring Leon Sinden Award winning actress Rachael McAllister, and Kacey Ainsworth (Little Mo Mitchell in the BBC soap opera EastEnders and Cathy Keating in the ITV drama series Grantchester) the classic tale of the four March sisters is by turns comic, dramatic, tragic, and romantic, and we are thrilled that it will be seen by a new audience down in the northern powerhouse.
This production is a remount of the original co-production between Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Watford Palace Theatre.
Until 23 Dec 2023
The Maggie Wall
In October and November, our captivating one-woman co-production with Aberdeen Arts Centre, The Maggie Wall went on tour. This new play by Martin McCormick was inspired by a monument near Dunning and the site of a mysterious grave for a woman tried and executed in the 17th century for witchcraft. It’s a powerful and timely exploration of the vulnerability of women and a chapter of Scottish and British history in which people were accused, tried and killed as suspected witches. After showing in Pitlochry in the summer, and Aberdeen in the autumn, The Maggie Wall toured to the Highlands to Elgin Town Hall and Eden Court in Inverness. Some members of our team even headed north to take in the show at Eden Court to enjoy the unique thrum and electricity of the performance in a new venue.
Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape
From our summer season, our thought-provoking co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, of Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape was performed in Edinburgh to great acclaim. This new play from Scottish playwright Peter Arnott, who previously delivered the beloved romp Monarch of the Glen at Pitlochry Festival Theatre in 2017, is full of politics and provocations, and has a quintessentially Perthshire flavour. The production cast included Scottish actor, John Michie (Taggart), veteran Scottish actor, Benny Young (Shetland), award-winning actress, Sally Reid (Shirley Valentine) and Leon Sinden Award winning actor Robbie Scott.
Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood
We also staged a co-production with OVO in St. Albans of Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood, which was performed in their outdoor Roman Theatre. A thrilling and comedic play exploring a dystopian future in this adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet by Lesley Hart.
Angela
Together with the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and in association with Naked Productions, our production of Angela is the first autobiographical play by leading dramatist Mark Ravenhill. Written during lockdown specifically for radio, the play centres on his mother suffering with dementia, looking back across her life. The play is poignantly set against Mark’s experience of beginning to learn his lifelong passion of ballet, in his fifties. Originally created for Sound Stage, which, at the time, was a brand new audio-digital platform offering audiences the chance to have an at home theatre experience. For a limited time you can now listen to this remarkable production on BBC Sounds.
We love it when our shows go on to have a further life on another stage. It means that the shows we produce can be seen by a wide range of people in other places. And what is theatre if not the opportunity to broaden connections, whether it’s to a line of prose, a character, a dance, or a song, and to offer the space to relate to stories that make us all feel less alone.