2009 Tour of Devon

In February and March, The 2009 Company, comprising all the students on the Department's Staging Shakespeare MA/MFA programme, toured venues around the county with their production of Much Ado About Nothing. Directed by Mick Mangan, the play was staged with an international cast of nine actors from the UK and North America playing all the parts. Using a 1920s setting, the production focused on the thin line that the play walks between comedy and potential tragedy.

Much Ado was an ensemble production, with the nine cast members also taking on all the main production and design responsibilities, and was deliberately stripped-down in terms of technical staging. Staged as part of the Master’s programme, its aim was to enable students to look at the staging of Shakespeare from the point of view of a touring show rather than a main-house production, and to play to a variety of different kinds of audiences. It also gave us a chance to share some of our work on Shakespeare with communities and schools around the county, running workshops, talks and question-and-answer sessions as well as staging the performance itself.

We were not attempting to mimic the touring conditions of an Elizabethan acting company, and there was no pretence that taking a play on the road in the sixteenth century and in the twenty-first were very similar experiences. Nonetheless, certain basic principles were adhered to which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would have shared: travelling light, cross-gender casting, doubling several parts, single-state lighting, and making a virtue of necessity in negotiating the challenges offered by different sizes and shapes of playing spaces. In our case these included University drama studios; the village hall at Payhembury; the Carlton Theatre, Teignmouth; the main hall of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth; and schools in Torquay and Stover. The terrible weather conditions which hit the South-West in early February forced the cancellation of one performance date, but another was successfully re-scheduled, re-rehearsed and re-staged almost a month later.

Proceeds from the tour were donated to the Drama Department Postgraduate Scholarship Fund, which was established to support future students at the University of Exeter and to enable a student who would not otherwise be able to afford it to advance his or her education in drama and theatre studies.

THE CAST
Kristen Olson-Jones: Claudio, Watchman
Symmonie Preston: Leonato, Sexton
Abby Rassette: Don Pedro, Verges
Elizabeth Richardson: Conrade, Margaret, Friar
Tom Salyers: Don John, Dogberry
Lauren Shepherd: Beatrice, Watchman
Katie Shewen: Borachio, Messenger
Elizabeth Vega: Hero, Watchman
Jeremy West: Benedick, Watchman