Curtain up, it’s conference time!

Ladies and gentlemen, we present for your delectation…..”Who’s Left Behind?”

“Who’s Left Behind?” is a spellbinding 20 minute piece of theatre, especially developed for Health & Safety Conferences. It explores specifically who is affected by an accident and the devastating impact it has.  It looks at the one thing that isn’t taken into account when we look at our RIDDORS, LTIs and the other myriad acronyms we all talk about – the hole that we leave in the lives of those who love us and care about us. It’s centred around the after effects of an accident and…..ah well, that would be telling and we don’t do spoilers!

What we can say is that it’s highly impactful, engaging and anyone who still has dry eyes by the end must be in desperate need of a heart implant!

It’s been a long gestation period – a couple of years of us scratching heads (our own, not other people’s), batting ideas back and forth and then squabbling over them. We like to call it creative dissonance……….sometimes descending into artistic differences. You know the situation, two people fighting over whose ball it is – cries of “Mine!”, “Gimme!” etc.

Anyway in the end it was Shaun who took the ball away. He took on the somewhat daunting task of crafting a longer, fuller piece than we’d normally perform.  There was just one rule – it would have to work as a real and believable slice of theatre.  He played a blinder, coming back with a beautifully written, emotionally challenging script that would really hit home.

Having surrendered the writing, there was no way I was giving up the task of directing! I have directed for theatre before, but each time I come to it, I have forgotten just how much fun it is.  We were able to very quickly assemble the initial cast of four from our uber talented bank of regular actors and I can’t begin to tell you just how great they were in their roles from the very off.  By the end of the first read through, both of the female cast members had red eyes and very wet faces!  One refreshing cuppa later and we got it ‘on its feet’ as together we began to work it up into the forceful and believable play it now is.

By the beginning of the next week our cast were on the road, debuting it to an astonished audience of hardened quarry workers, many of whom by all accounts appeared to have something in their eye!  It has proved a resounding success both to the audiences and our client, who texted us before the end of the first day:

“Just about to finish the first session, the drama is superb, very powerful and it’s exactly what we were wanting, top work yet again.”

And as reviews go, we’ll take that!

So what now? Well that’s up to you.  It’s adaptable for a variety of working environments, it’s ready to go and…..well you know where we are!