22nd Lorn Drama Festival
This year’s Lorn Drama Festival will take place over three nights from March 27 to 29 in Oban's Corran Halls.
The festival continues to be supported by local clubs and those from further afield and organisers are always delighted to see Accent players making the trip up from Campbeltown. This year they welcome Dunoon Drama Club for the first time and are really pleased that all the clubs take the time to come to Oban and perform for you, the audience.
Festivals like this give amateur actors and directors the opportunity to take the audience to different places and tell a wide variety of stories, some unashamedly comic, others more serious. It also allows creative writers to try their hand at writing for the stage and organisers are pleased to be awarding the Drama Festival Quill again after its inaugural outing last year. This award is for the best original script, written by or for the clubs and in its first production. It is hoped that this award will continue to encourage clubs and local writers to produce interesting and original work for the festival.
This year’s festival promises a mix of youth and experience, and comedy and drama. Writing talent is also on show with Seil performing an original script written by John Colston and Caroline Morgan.
The work of established writers are also welcome and this year the festival has A Respectable Funeral by Jimmie Chinn performed by Dunoon Players. This play is one of Chinn’s earliest plays and was originally performed as a double bill with From Here to the Library on stage and then on Radio 4 in the early 1980s. This is a well-observed piece examining in a tragi-comic way the family tensions that are uncovered immediately after a funeral. A more recent Radio 4 writer, John Finnemore, wrote English for Pony Lovers and Hot Desk as part of his Double Acts series of two-handed plays. Finnemore is well known for comedy writing for The Now Show and the award-winning series Cabin Pressure. Both these plays are presented by Benderloch and North Connel Drama Club.
A much darker two-handed play, When a Man Knows, is performed by Taynuilt and District Drama Society adults. Taynuilt juniors are presenting Bad Reception by Paul Vincent, a comedy play. The other junior play this year is Charlotte Holmes: future detective by Richard James performed by Benderloch juniors.
Accent Players are performing Grave Prospects by Isabella C Rae, a dark comedy set in a graveyard where the living interact with the recently departed.
Accent, Dunoon and Benderloch recently performed at the Campbeltown Festival. Benderloch won first prize and the inaugural Jenny Black Memorial Trophy for best acting. Accent were second. Both these teams will go to the SCDA Wester Division final in Castle Douglas in April. Oban audiences will have a chance to see these award-winning plays, along with all the other festival plays at the Corran Halls from March 27 to 29.