The Elephant has left the room

So the virtual curtain has come down on The Maltings' run of TheBYTE's  'This Is My Elephant' which has exceeded all my expectations a brilliant job by uber-director Lisa, scriptmeister Anna Reynolds and the cast. The quality of the performances, scripting and characterisation were superb and demonstrated just what a strong group we now have at TheBYTE - our only sadness is that soon we are losing some to university and drama school but we know they will go there with some solid experience and technique behind them thanks to their time at TheBYTE and Best - and hopefully a whole bunch of great memories. Here are a few pics...

We did film the show too - hopefully we can do something with that.

We think that after the Greenwich Festival there's still another step for this show to take. The lovely thing was that when we asked the cast whether they'd be interested in a further show and rework, their hands shot up in unison.

The Maltings is a lovely little theatre. When Best was launched it was the venue for our first three years' public performances - 'The Selfish Giant',  'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Shake, Ripple & Roll.' but then it just became too small for the sizes of casts we had.

Then when we launched TheBYTE we took our first shows there too - 'The Musicians', 'Just' and 'Shut Up'. At that time it was  happy and thriving council-run venue with enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff who supported us at every stage. It was sad to see this energy dismantled - firstly when their budget was cut (mostly diverted to the incoming Trestle) and then when it was threatened with closure.

But now the space has a new lease of life thanks to local group, 'OVO'. They've brightened it up, brought high quality theatre back to the stage and we are delighted that from September we'll be basing our youth theatre activities there - including (we hope) a technical stream for budding lighting gurus.

So next on the agenda is our Best School of Acting showcase - 'Reality Bites'. This is a collection of mini scenes from the works of James Saunders and aims to flex their Stanislavskian muscles. It's tomorrow (Wednesday 26th March) at The Maltings.

For today, the last piece of costume for the weekends 'Oscars' show has arrived - joy!