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Closed Theatre: Burnage Garden Village Players, 1912-2020

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It strode across a century, enduring wars,

The shifts of fashion and the scorns of time,

A post-war enclave of a simpler age; but

Not the gulf of Covid, short but absolute.

 

Once, summer evenings in this noon-cool hall

Filled hours with ice-cream, raffles and applause

As year-worn boards upheld performances

And eager actors tried their ways with words

 

And chill October nights in this now-empty shell

Heard hard-rehearsing Thespians, their voices

Seeking meaning, nuance and character, the

Eloquent expressions of their deeper selves.

 

All this is ended. No player frets their hour,

No royal anthem prises watchers to their feet

Nor raffle ticket wins a night of drunken joy.

Most tragical of all, no common word

 

Steals through the houses huddled round the green,

Submerging egos in community. No tricky lines

To fumble or to prompt; the boards lie bare. And

Trying silence conquers all our yesterdays.

 

 

 

 

 

Burnage garden village playerstheatre

◄ Washed Out to Sea

England, or To England ►

Comments

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Stephen Gospage

Sun 27th Mar 2022 17:20

A beautiful, well described piece. I loved 'Submerging egos in community'. We need more of that.

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raypool

Sun 27th Mar 2022 13:24

As a fellow poet and musician I am keenly aware of the sadness of empty venues such as you describe so lovingly and sensitively. It is of course the lifeblood of communities to have such places as Greg mentions. I tried invading a nest of thespians once playing Saglieri from Amadeus, non speaking but I helped with the sound system, such is that life.

Ray

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Greg Freeman

Sun 27th Mar 2022 09:10

I enjoyed the elegaic tone of this, John, as an am-dram player who may have given it all up for good. But nil desperandum! Our little Surrey group recently successfully performed three one-act plays that had originally been shelved two years ago at the start of lockdown. Am-dram and poetry open-mics really complement each other, I discovered years ago, giving both performance skills added confidence, one feeding the other. The confidence may be misplaced but ... forgive me for adding this clip by way of illustration! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKwWucfN-4M

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