Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie is festival show from the Arundel Players

Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.com 
and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565
Visit Shots! now
Gill Lambourn brings to life a world that has disappeared as she directs Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie for the Arundel Players as part of the Arundel Festival.

Performances run from Saturday, August 17 to Saturday, August 24 at 7.30pm at The Priory Playhouse Theatre, London Road, Arundel, BN18 9AT (tickets on 07523 417926 and https://www.ticketsource.co.uk).

It offers an autobiographical play about Laurie's childhood and his coming of age beginning just as WWI is ending. His mother, accompanied by her six children, arrives at their cottage home in Gloucestershire. The piece then follows their life and adventures in a village populated with a rich selection of true English eccentrics – a show full of gentle humour and some poignant moments, Gill is promising.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“I have directed it before and it is a play that I love. The book is beautifully, poetically written.

Gill Lambourn (contributed pic)Gill Lambourn (contributed pic)
Gill Lambourn (contributed pic)

"The writing is so lovely and they use a lot of it in the play because it uses a narrator so there is a lot of the prose from the book there and you get so much of the poetry. I kind of think of it as a sort of English Under Milk Wood except that the characters are real rather than imaginary but they are true British eccentrics.

"I love the feud between the two grannies that don't speak to each other but couldn't really live without each other because it is their feud that keeps them going. But the point is that it is a world that doesn't exist anymore in any way.

"There is so much nostalgia. And there are songs and some of the older members of the cast remember learning some of the songs at school, songs like One Man Went To Mow and The Ash Grove, but the youngsters in the cast have never heard of them! It's strange how quickly in life things become the past.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“I have got 13 in the cast. The narrator tells the story from when he arrives in the village aged three. You don't know what age he is at the end but I would guess he is in his late teens so really it goes through from 1918 to the 1930s. It never tells you the exact year but you realise that he is growing up and that the world is moving on and that village life will never be the same. It's episodic, about his memories of different people in the village and also you get his mother and how she spent her entire life waiting for her man to come back to her. He went off and never came back...

“With a large cast is always quite a challenge because you never really get everybody there until the last minute but also the challenge is that the play is written as if you have to choreograph the piece.

"There are just a few chairs and a table and everything is created by the cast moving around them and using the chairs and the table so really in that sense it has to be choreographed as well as acted, and you have to have really lovely visuals.”

Performances run from Saturday, August 17 to Saturday, August 24 at 7.30pm at The Priory Playhouse Theatre.

Follow us
©National World Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.Cookie SettingsTerms and ConditionsPrivacy notice