The Revengers’ Comedies

By Alan Ayckbourn, directed by Philip de Glanville

8th – 12th November 2011

The Revengers’ Comedies, by Alan Ayckbourn, is understandably very rarely performed. It is a two-part play (in four acts) which takes just under 5 hours in total to stage and was altogether a massive undertaking, involving a large proportion of the Club in one way or another.  We had 21 in the cast, and another ten or so in the Production Team.

Rehearsals started at the end of June and continued all summer, so that we were ready to launch into the main rehearsal period at the beginning of September with the majority of the 43 scenes blocked and the major characters well ahead of schedule with line-learning.  To their enormous credit everyone was ‘off-book’ 4 weeks before we opened, and in the end the show went remarkably smoothly.

We performed both parts twice in the week leading up to a performance of the whole play on Saturday 12th November, with Part One in the afternoon and Part Two in the evening, to packed houses – an extraordinary and uplifting experience for us all to have been a part of, and evidence of what we can achieve when we all work together!