Shakespeare in Salterton: The Tempest






A much-loved Shakespeare play performed in a Budleigh garden at the home of  Fairlynch Museum’s co-founder Joy Gawne by a troupe of enthusiastic local actors… What more would you want for a Saturday summer evening’s entertainment? 

Exeter & Countess Wear Community Theatre will stage an outdoor performance of The Tempest in the garden of Cramalt Lodge at 2 Cricketfield Lane. Members of the cast are featured on this poster.

Director Jill Coram says, ‘I am particularly looking forward to directing this play with its so many facets, including betrayal, colonisation, slavery, murderous plotting and magic. Then there is of course the shipwreck and was it the shipwreck which started off a course of events which affected all the characters you will see in the play. Come along and judge for yourself!’

Jill explained that the location was suggested by Joy Gawne’s niece. ‘Once I viewed it, I felt it was perfect and lent itself beautifully to “The Tempest”.’

Known for her love of theatre as well as for helping to found Fairlynch, Joy is delighted that the garden was being used as a backdrop.

‘We used to have dressing-up entertainments at WI summer meetings in the 1960s, but Cramalt Lodge was used for Shakespeare for the first time in 2015 when there was a production of Twelth Night,’ she told me.

Some Budleigh theatre-goers may remember Joy’s performances from the past, notably a production based on scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass. The show was staged in the Public Hall in January 1957, with music specially written and arranged by no less a person than the late Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s mother, a former pupil of the composer Gustav Holst.

Budleigh author and artist Joyce Dennys and Joy Gawne played respectively the White Queen and the Red Queen in a partnership which delighted audiences. Joy would welcome future Shakespeare productions at Cramalt Lodge. ‘There is a balcony,’ she says, ‘so why not Romeo and Juliet?’

Exeter & Countess Wear Community Theatre’s production of ‘The Tempest’ is also being staged at the following venues:
Thurs 13 and Fri 14 June  7.30 pm St Margaret’s Church Gardens, Topsham
Fri 21 June 7.30 pm at The Tally Ho! Countess Wear
Sat 22 June 7.00 pm at Jubilee Park, Kingswear, Dartmouth

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