Hot-Blog

“I laughed myself into a coughing frenzie – thank you my wonderfully gifted & talented friends for a brilliant night. I applaud you for your hard work and believing in your talents to produce such a great piece. Love you loads.

xxx” Nikki

Hotbuckle’s production of Joshua achieved the difficult feat of being very funny and illustrating the corruptible nature of power in our society. The hunger for belonging and meaning that besets the everyman of today leaves us open to expoilation and makes us capable of nonsensical cruelty. Today’s wars and divisions are in then name of Truth, justice and GOD and Joshua manages to show how both absurd and dangerously  manipulated this can become. The use of the intended crucifixtion of Joshua was brilliant. It simultaneously reminded me of  “the life of Brian “ , Abu Greab detention centre and  the scarifice of Jesus!!! The play was expertly poised between genuine laughter and discomfort. The acting was superb especially the characters around Joshua who whirled in and out of his “cell” with wonderful energy and light. the last scene was so funny that I am eagerly awaiting the writer’s next production.!! Emma Buckley

Just to say, Gemma, I thought you were all wonderful. I thought the play was brilliant and I just loved the whole thing. You are a truly talented lot. Thank you for inviting us! Lots of love  Penny Vincenzi

Dear Gemma and Caroline,

Well, I am still reeling from an absoloutely fantastic night watching ‘Joshua’. It was truly a remarkable live theatre experience with gut wrenching emotion and a lot of great laughs. Again, the acting was superb and we 3 in the front row felt privileged to be there and part of it. It kept us enthralled throughout and for me second time around the story and themes became even more profound.

Huge congratulations to Adrian, he has great talent and I hope he gets the recognition he deserves for this piece of work. It is a very relevant play in these times and provided so many discussion areas amongst those who see it.  Well done to you Gemma, I laughed and laughed at all those characters who were so comical and those voices – Annette and I had a very deep chat about Mrs Whelan in the car on the way home!  Caroline, you were brilliant as the killer cleaner! I loved Mrs E who cleans and tidys and then literally does sort the evil Stenson and just despatches him away with her pinnie on. We are in awe of you all. The rest of the cast were all fantastic. We had a magical evening.

I am fearful I am sounding schmaltzy but I loved it, hope you the rest of the tour goes brilliantly for you.

Thank you so much,

Noo x

We held a fund raising event on the 30th of May at the Riverhouse Barn Arts Centre in Walton on Thames, in order to help raise funds to support this tour. The event was a fantastic success and raised over £3000 for the tour. After months of preparation and detailed planning the evening ran so smoothly. Everything worked brilliantly. The Riverhouse looked stunning, the food, all catered by Susan Segal was delicious and looked so pretty, the enormous drawing of a pinned butterfly commissioned by us for the play looked quite breathtaking in the corner of the Barn. Every little detail added to the atmosphere of the evening, which was laced with excitement and felt so wonderfully supportive. All the guests had a really wonderful evening – and why shouldn’t they? The auction items and raffle prizes were superb – thanks to all the friends and colleagues who donated themselves and their services. The music got everyone dancing and the cabaret got everyone laughing. Our auctioneer did a back flip on stage for £20 and we performed a scene from Joshua to give everyone a taster and to encourage them to the rehearsed reading to be held a few weeks later. What really touched me about the event was the support I received from my friends and community. So many people turned up on the afternoon of the event to help put out tables, set up the band, blow up balloons, lay tables and prepare the auction tables. It was a wonderful feeling and I shall never forget the generosity shown. I am particularly grateful to Susan at The Riverhouse, who has been my mentor since the very beginning of Hotbuckle and who let us use the barn for free that night. Priceless.

Money from Surrey County council paid for The beautiful butterfly drawn by Internationally acclaimed artist Julian Farrar which formed and will form a major part of the set for the rehearsed reading and for the tour. it also paid the actors for the rehearsed reading ……

Well the first one took place about three weeks ago. It was a tense three days. First of all the original script ran at just over three hours, so there was a wee bit of cutting to do, which was no bad thing. The play stood up fairly well all things considered, but I will be returning to the drawing board in a week or so having had time to mull over the results. Basically it’s looking in a healthy, one could say promising condition, but we’re not there yet! It seems that my sense of humour has an appreciative audience which is encouraging. My dialogue gets a definite thumbs up but we do need to be a little more disciplined in certain areas, such as finding a genre that applies to the whole play ( not sure what I think about that yet, although I know where they’re coming from)
Anyway so stuff to do, stuff to do.
The next rehearsed reading is on the 19th of June, by which time the play will have been honed dramatically I hope! See you there ( The Riverhouse Barn, Walton on Thames 8pm )

Our printer has just come back to us four days after I had submitted all the artwork for our Joshua Flyers, to tell us that none of the artwork is high resolution enough. Great! This means I’ve got to get Julian Farrar, our resident artist  (resident in Sweden that is) to send me some higher resolution scans of his drawings and fonts as well as request higher resolution fonts from all our suppliers. Excellent. We start rehearsing for our “rehearsed reading” on Monday. So basically I’ve got to sort out all this before then, which leaves me one working day and the weekend, as well as prepare and take Gemma’s drama club at three o’clock for an hour and finish my Joshua script edits. Bloody marvellous. Happy days.

Joshua is the new play I have written which we will be touring in October next year. I am very excited about the prospect as it will be the first time that my sense of humour has been let loose on an unsuspecting public in a totally unadulterated form!

It will not be hampered by a restriction on subject matter or the fact that I am performing something that somebody else has written. No! This will be me, appearing in my own play, saying my own words….. oh and some other actors too if I’m honest.

More seriously though credit must go to Gemma who has got this project off the ground against what at times have looked like overwhelming odds. But damn it all we are going to do this tour come what may, hey, you only live once!

Funding has once again had it’s ups and downs for us. We got some funding we didn’t expect and didn’t get some we did expect. All in all tho’ we’re still down, so need to raise more by september!

Gemma has a few plans, such as a fund raising event at the end of May which we seriously need to work otherwise we might have to sell the kids.

Read through on monday ready for a rehearsed reading on Thursday….. aaaagh!

This is vital to our survival and unfortunately there’s no getting round it! Oh and we’ve just heard that we’re not getting £4000 which we thought we were getting! Hurrah!