Owen added: “We are very aware that audiences have to build back their confidence and we have to show them what a safe place the theatre is. Capacity at the moment is about 120, which is roughly a third of our usual capacity – so that means that there is a lot of space around people including rows empty between every booking.”
Owen Calvert-Lyons working with actors Oliver Stoney, Roddy Peters and Naveed Kahn on stage at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds
- Credit: Tom Soper
He said that it was also very important to return with the right show. He felt that this modern staging of Around The World In 80 Days struck the right balance.
The New Wolsey has championed disabled performers by forming a production partnership with Graeae theatre company and then took the lead in helping to establish the Ramps on the Moon project. Both projects were incredibly successful at integrating disabled performers into mainstream productions.
With Graeae, the New Wolsey developed the Ian Drury musical Reasons To Be Cheerful, which was originally staged in 2010, was revived in 2012, and ended up being featured in the Special Olympics opening ceremony. The high point of Ramps on the Moon came with a critically acclaimed revival of the Pete Townsend musical Tommy which then went on a UK tour after its Ipswich run.
Published:
11:30 AM May 6, 2021
Sarah Holmes with the team at New Wolsey Theatre. The Ipswich theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary this year
- Credit: Mike Kwasniak
Spring is a time for renewal and rebirth. At the end of May, the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich will be opening its doors once again, hoping to put the deprivations of lockdown behind it, and looking forward to a future full of colour, innovation and entertainment.
Turn back the clock 20 years, and in 2001, the New Wolsey Theatre was doing the same thing. After two years of closure, following the collapse of the previous Wolsey Theatre company in 1999, the theatre was reborn as the New Wolsey and guided by two new, but experienced theatre-makers, the husband and wife team of Sarah Holmes and Peter Rowe, who had been enticed away from Theatr Clywd in north Wales, to run the Suffolk theatre.
Published:
7:00 PM April 28, 2021
Adrian Lukis as Jane Austen s dashing rogue George Wickham in a new play from Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, Being Mr Wickham, which explores the former soldier 30 years after Pride and Prejudice
- Credit: Original Theatre Company
The Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, emerges from lockdown by staging a live online broadcast of Being Mr Wickham – a new play exploring the character of George Wickham, Jane Austen’s duplicitous soldier in her classic novel Pride and Prejudice.
The role of Wickham is being revisited by actor and co-author Adrian Lukis who first played the part in the BBC’s classic 1994 production opposite Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth.