A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in St. Helen’s

You may or may not remember a long while back I was ever so proud of myself for tidying up the Rough Magic Theatre storage room – and how, in October 2021, we had our first Alice in Wonderland gig for a very long time. How I repaired and spruced up our Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit’s House scenery and even got myself a wig, as my hair was no longer the correct length.

Then after visiting Tim’s family in Norfolk for Christmas, we got back and on December 28th we heard a peculiar noise and found the mess you see in the pictures.

As you can see a large chunk of the plasterboard ceiling had fallen down because of a leak in the bathroom above. The sodden plasterboard had given up and fallen down with a load of dirty water. This was massively upsetting as we had planned to try and get a few more gigs with the Alice show. This was a major setback.

So, having planned to push the show and get a few more gigs, we instead decided that this was a sign to retire the big Alice show but present the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party as a walkabout show only on the new website, and that we would spruce it up and renew the fabric on the tea table when we got a booking.

When I originally created the fabric for the tea table I used spray glue to attach the cut-out pink ripstop layer to the black ripstop layer beneath. This meant that the black layer where the glue was exposed had been getting a bit dirty and shabby-looking, even before the leak accident, so this was a good excuse to take the tea table apart and attempt to do a better job with some new fabric.

We were asked to bring the Mad Hatter and Alice to St. Helen’s library for a “HAF”(Holiday Activities and Food) event in the Easter holidays and proceeded to source the material we needed for a new tablecloth.

I wasn’t able to find fabric in the same fluorescent pink as the original but I did manage to find two similar shades of bright pink and source a copious amount of bondaweb to join the cut pink layer to the black layer neatly, without any messy glue. An expensive but neat solution.

Removing the teapots so the old fabric could be removed

Removing the teapots so the old fabric could be removed

Plan to incorporate 2 different shades of pink on the tablecloth

Marking out the shapes for cutting on the paper bondaweb backing.

Cutting out

The gig went very well and we are are already planning the “Mad Hatter’s” next outing to a Food and Drink Festival (more details to come soon). Sadly the selfie below is the only picture we got time to take on the performance day and doesn’t show off the fabric at all. I’ll take some more pics the next time we get it out.

In the meantime check out the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party show page by clicking HERE. We have lots of space left in our diary for this year and next year so please do GET IN TOUCH 😊.

“You shall go to the Pantomime!” – “Oh, no you won’t”….”Oh, yes we will!”

In February this year I was preparing the kids for their first public performance in our local community pantomime (Bentham Theatre Group).

Last year’s pantomime was “Peter Pan” and Anthony and Miranda were then aged nearly 3 and 5 years old. They (and us) attended all of the rehearsals including the dress only for Tim and I to test positive for Covid just days before the performances.

Obviously, we all had to isolate as a family and the kids didn’t get to perform in the show.

I was determined that this year would be different and we went through the whole process again. This year’s Panto being “The Wizard of Oz”. The kids initially said they wanted to be in it but then were a little daunted when I first played the MGM film for them and found it quite frightening. Soon after, however, I was getting repeated requests to play the film from Miranda and Anthony enjoyed it too. Anthony tends to be wary of films when he doesn’t know what will happen but enjoys them on repeated viewings.

I told them that they could be Munchkins or Flying Monkeys and they were keen on the idea of being Munchkins so I had to make them some Munchkin hats (see below) which I was quite proud of. They are made of various things I had lying around the house:

I built them onto a hat and a headband that we already had as I was concerned that a thin elastic would bite into their necks and be uncomfortable and I wanted them to be able to be able to wear them for extended periods without taking them off all the time or refusing to wear them.

I had a dentist’s appointment in the week of the panto performances and having got a cold I thought I had better take a lateral flow test to double check it wasn’t Covid. Unfortunately the test was positive and not just a faint line but a vibrant dark red that appeared almost immediately.

I took myself off to the top of the house (where our bedroom is) and Tim tested himself and the kids and their tests were negative.

Tim and I were both determined that the kids wouldn’t miss out on their Panto performances 2 years running, so Tim looked after the kids, took them to the performances and provided me with food and drinks at intervals, (he was a proper hero and slept on our very tiny sofa as well). We were very careful (using copious amounts of sanitising spray and wipes) and the kids managed to do their Panto performances and thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

Meanwhile, I was stuck in my bedroom upstairs not having to look after the kids and able to watch copious amounts of T.V. on my laptop. So, not all bad.

I started to feel pretty yucky and got lots of sleep in soon after I went upstairs, but when I wasn’t sleeping and eating I watched some Anime films on Youtube, (I found a Studio Ghibli film I hadn’t seen before called “Angel’s Egg” which was VERY interesting). I really wanted to re-watch Howl’s Moving Castle again but discovered the only place I could get it was Netflix so I caved in and got myself a cheapo subscription.

Having binge watched a large number of Studio Ghibli films I suddenly remembered that Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio was on Netflix and decided to watch that.

I had already seen numerous trailers bigging up the stop motion on this film, saying that it took the medium to a higher level than ever seen before, using Del Toro’s vast experience in the direction of live action films and transferring camera techniques more usually reserved for live action to the stop motion medium:

I shall do a full review of this film and comparisons with Disney’s recent live-action/CGI re-make and Upfront Puppet Theatre’s live puppetry Pinocchio in my next blog post…..Watch this space…. 👀!