The Powerhouse

Two sessions have taken place at the Powerhouse at Nottingham Trent University, This is Act One. MA Dram. As opposed to Act Two. Am Dram. The cast is as follows:

Bride - Rhiannon Jones
Groom - Ben Hargraves
Best Man - Hugh Dichmont
MC - Michael Pinchbeck

So far we have workshopped movement and text. Four Weddings and a Funeral. A Wedding. A Respectable Wedding. The Wicker Man. A transcript from one of the flights on September 11th. We have worked on removing characters from Brecht's A Respectable Wedding to see how absence affects the action. I am realising already that perhaps more than populism and elitism the main area of investigation is absence and presence.

B [To Father] Eat up Dad you always come off worst.

G Damn Good.

G Cow’s don’t eat cod they’re vegetarian

BM It’s a good light for cod

B Really father it’s too nasty

B Consumption of the spine

BM Cheers old chap

G Cheers everyone

B Every bit. My husband planned it, made the drawings bought the wood, planed it all down, and glued it together, and it really looks quite nice.

BM It looks marvellous. I only wonder how you found the time.

G Evenings, quite often in the lunch hour, but mostly first thing in the morning.

B He got up at five every morning and worked.


B He wanted to do the whole thing himself. Later on we’ll show you the rest of the furniture.


B Longer than you or any of us lot. When you think what went into it. He even made his own glue.

G You can’t trust that rubbish you get in the shops.

B I can never see anything funny in your stories

G I think Father tells a wonderful story

BM First rate. Specially the way you make sure you don’t miss the point.

B They’re too long

G Rubbish

BM Concise. Simple. Artistic.




We have improvised around The Aristocrats joke - an obscene account of a talent scout - substituting the family for the guests at the head table. We've read out wedding cards to records. This is a period of play that is integral to the dynamic of the group. New text evolved during these sessions and has a self-referential tone.

B - Bride
G - Groom
MC - Master of Ceremony

B / G We were working on this show. It was an MA piece and we were roped into playing the Bride and the Groom. We’d never met before but as we were both from Cambridge we talked about what hospitals we were born in

MC I was born in Cambridge too

B / G What schools we’d been to

G She said St Mary’s

B He said ‘Ooooo’

G She said ‘I know’

B He said my Dad’s a vicar

G She said ‘Oooooo’

B He said ‘I know’

B / G We hit it off straight away