It was a script-in-hand play reading and there was a cast of actors, three professional and the others amateur.
Fair play: Tim Newell on an Aylesbury Meeting performance
‘The subject was attractive enough to draw a full house.’
At Aylesbury Meeting last year, during Heritage Open Day weekend, we welcomed a hundred people every day. One of these visitors was particularly moved by being in our beautiful, listed Meeting house. He arranged to meet me to talk through a possibility that fascinated him. We went for tea in the nearby museum a week later.
The man’s name was James, and he offered to put on his play about Elizabeth Fry. It had already been an acknowledged success when put on in Newham, where Fry lived, but James felt that the setting of a Meeting house would suit the subject extremely well.
Our Meeting house is full when forty people attend (usually for weddings and Memorial Meetings) and we don’t hold many funds, so the event would be a play reading from local talented actors, rather than a fully-staged performance. After several meetings, and with the benefit of a fee from facilitating a local funeral, we could afford to commission the play from the Arts Centre in Aylesbury. We advertised the event through Friends and the Area Meeting, and the Arts Centre has a good following. The subject was attractive enough to draw a full house, even on what turned out to be a rather soggy evening.
Our report to the Area Meeting describes what happened.
‘An audience of thirty-five watched the play Elizabeth Fry: The Angel of Prisons in Aylesbury Meeting House on the evening of Saturday April 27th. It was a script-in-hand play reading and there was a cast of actors, three professional and the others amateur. The Meeting House provided a wonderful venue “in the round” with the audience sitting on three sides and the performers very close and in the middle [see photo]. We met the author of the play, James Kenworth, at our Heritage Open Day event, and he has worked with Tim Newell over the last eight months to bring the performance to fruition.
‘After the performance a few people left, but most stayed for a question and answer session with Tim, James, the director Dario Knight, and Sally Bicheno, an Aylesbury Friend who is a prison chaplain. We had a wide-ranging discussion, including the state of our prisons today and comparisons with other countries. There was a particular emphasis on female prisoners and we learnt of the devastating effect of even a short sentence on family life, sentences given for offences including not paying a TV licence.’
A friend who attended felt moved to write to his MP. The Friend suggested alternative ways of dealing with the issue of prisons – one which would not contribute to increasing the number of children – currently 270,000 – who are affected by having a parent in prison each year. Could we all not do the same?
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