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 😊.

Mega Busy!

She gets everywhere!!!

So, as promised, the everything happening at once that I promised to tell you all about.

Lots of things have been happening just when I am trying to really crack on with the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre show that is creeping up increasingly quickly.  Despite this I have got the majority of the final quality puppets drawn out and I plan to get all of the artwork finished for Monday when it will be taken to the printers.  Our filming date has been pushed back to next Friday, all being well.  A large chunk of the sliders are complete and the corrugated plastic scenery that things will be mounted on will also be complete by Monday.  The curtain is already finished!

So, what else has been happening?  I hear you ask.  Yesterday I had an audition for a tour of Little Red Riding Hood with Norwich Puppet Theatre.  This is the first in house show they have produced for some time, so it is very exciting.  The voices I have been using for Hansel & Gretel came in very nicely, I fancy.  I also got to play with an in progress wolf rod puppet and used a song, some acting and puppetry from our Alice in Wonderland show to demonstrate my skills for them.  This took all day, including the drive from North Yorkshire to Norwich and back.  The people I met there were all very nice by the way.

This leads on to another thing that has happened.  We are doing our Alice in Wonderland show at Hebden Bridge Arts Festival on Saturday the 25th of June at 1.30pm.  I am also doing shoe box toy theatre making workshops at Buxton Puppet Festival on Saturday the 30th of July.

Given the amount of work I need to do in time for the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival, you will not hear from me for some time.  If any of you are attending the festival I shall see you there.  I am very much hoping that someone will write a review of our show, and I intend to try and write up some of other people’s.  So, goodbye for now.  Don’t forget, you can help support our show by going to our Wefund page, please see the links on the right of the home page.