By Eric Walrond, Work experience student from Penair School
As a young performer, finding productions which grant you stage time can be difficult. Having experienced this first hand, two Truro College students are striving to give budding dramatists and actors opportunities to perform and help create new and exciting work through their own theatre company.
A Level Drama and Theatre Studies students Jimmy Addy and Allan Neve, from Liskeard and St. Agnes respectively, founded the Wild Oak Theatre Company under the name Whimsical Wonderment in April 2011. They set up the company mindful of how tough it can be for performing arts students to find writing work or on-stage roles, and decided to use it as a way of making the most of their experience of drawing people together, while writing and directing their own contemporary and thought-provoking pieces for fellow young performers (and sometimes themselves) to act in.
Their first production, a short play titled ‘The Chair’, toured arts festivals around Cornwall that May and was excellently received; Polperro Festival’s Chairperson Robert Springett said that ‘Whimsical Wonderment captured the audience with their wit and strength of performance’. Following their recent name change, the two began to write their second piece, ‘Wunderkammer’, which looks at the nature of memory and whether it can be trusted.
Work on Wunderkammer is ongoing and if you would like to get involved, the Wild Oak Theatre Company would love to hear from you; their email address is wildoaktheatrecompany@gmail.com and they also have a Facebook page you can visit.
