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Our plans for 2024

Our Spring/Summer production will be Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit and will be performed on Wednesday 19th to Friday 21st June. Note the change of days from our usual Thursday to Saturday performances. We expect tickets to go on sale to our subscribers at the start of April, and to the general public on 1st May.

We had our first read-through of the play on Sunday 25 February in Wedmore Village Hall. The play is now cast, and rehearsals are getting underway.

A note from Jendy Weekes, director of Blithe Spirit

“ Having been a member of Wedmore Theatre now for over 25 years, I have decided that it is time to hang up my Director’s hat. I asked the Steering Group if I could direct the spring production to make this my swan song, and they very kindly agreed that I could. As a result, I have chosen to direct Sir Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit – a play I have always loved, and in which I performed many years ago when I lived in Suffolk.

For those of you who do not know the play, it was written in 1941 when Noel Coward decided to leave the bombing in London and have a short holiday in Portmeirion, on the north Wales coast. He sat at his typewriter one morning and within three weeks he had finished the play! Coward described the play as an improbable farce. It was first seen in the West End in 1941 and ran for 1,997 performances, a new record for a non-musical play in London.

The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant Madame Arcati to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his wilful and temperamental first wife, Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles’s marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.

There have been several films of the play – the most famous of which being in 1945 with Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati.

If you would like to be part of the production, I would be delighted for you to come and join us – we shall need bodies backstage to help with props, building the set, helping with make-up, costumes, running the bar, front of house, etc. Please contact me by email at director@wedmoretheatre.com

Jendy Weekes