Love and Fire, A play for Totnes

‘Love and Fire - A Totnes Play’ was commissioned by The Dartington Playgoers from local playwright Nick Stimson after a series of community drama workshops led by Nick and the director Richard Clark .
The play was inspired by Totnes, its stories and characters and tells the story of three generations of two Totnes families the Millman’s and Avery’s between the years 1944 and 2013. And with a thoroughly theatrical flair Nick has given Bertha Winchester, Totnes’s famous lady grave-digger at Follaton Cemetery the role of transporting the audience through time.

The play highlights the effects on the different generations of the two families of the Second World War, the closure of the Harris’s Bacon Factory in the early 1990s, and the devastating East Gate fire.

1945 sees these two families, who were previously great friends fall out, but the play opens in the present with the meeting of Ian Millman and Jenny Avery, now Sercombe, the grandchildren of the original friends. They have not met since the night of the East Gate fire in 1990, when their families’ bitter enmity ended their budding relationship.

Bereavement, betrayal, hatred and its destruction of young love are pondered and resolved in 2013 by Ian and Jenny’s evocation of the spiritual heritage of Totnes in the Leechwell Garden at the mystical Leechwell itself.

The play boasts 25 actors, has live music from a three piece band and costumes from the three periods spanned by the play. It is being performed on a traverse stage with a raked audience on both sides

Performances are in the Ariel Centre, KEVICC on April 10th - 13th at 7.30pm. Tickets can be purchased for £7 (£5 conc.) from Ariel Centre—01803 869200 or
Totnes Information Centre—01803 863168

If you would like to become part of Dartington Playgoers, please contact us via our website http://www.playgoers.co.uk/

For more information visit http://www.playgoers.co.uk/