Ben Hur is a Theatre Royal Bath proyect that aims to involve the community in a epic play. With this idea comes many questioning and trouble, as the people from Bath are not proffesional actors that you can hire, but they go willingly to participate in the community play and there might be trouble with people that are not really compromised with the play.
First wa the issue of making the play known and letting people know that they can come and participate in every way the want,; acting, music, stage manager, costume, marketing, etc. As said before, the people that might want to be involved are not professionals, so they decided to have quite a few rehersals with everybody before presenting the play at the theatre.
One of the major problems was how to get people really compromised with the play and guarantee that they would be in the rehersals and more importantly in the actual date of the play (29th of October). First they made the advertisements of the comunnity play, inside them you could find a form that you fill to participate in the area that you wanted.
The genral challeng of producing a community play is that you never know how many people are going to be interested in participating and if your going to complete your cast and staff.
What the team decided that people that wanted to get involved had to pay a “fee” (£30). This way they might feel a bit more compromised with the production as they already payed to be in it.
To prepare the people of Bath to be part of this proyect the Theatre Royal Bath has prepared a number of workshops since november. This will be followed by the rehersals once the rolls of the actors.
Although there was a certain incertity of the amoun of people that were going to be interested in participating in this play they had a huge response from the people of Bath, about 300 hundres people showed interest in participating in different ways.
THIS IS BATH ARTICLE
THIS IS BATH ARTICLE
The rolls were finally decided in a similar way as “britains got talent”, where the people have auditions and the udges finally decide which will do what part in the play. It was decided that the part of Ben Hur will be played by Matt Hocken who always showed interesnt in theatre and was part of a youth theatre group at the Ustinov.
THIS IS BATH ARTICLE
The idea of Ben Hur came from the fact that Bath was a roman city and Ben Hur is a roman story and a silver screen epic film.
We will only see the real result when it is presented in the Theatre Royal in October. Hopefully nothing will go wrong and it will be total success.
