Theatre and Dance

Well now, there’s a solution – and it will also get you out of your pit and into your clothes!

On a Sunday lunchtime, the Market Theatre in Hitchin are offering what’s believed to be the world’s only live soap opera.

Performed outside in the theatre Courtyard, you can enjoy a drink and light refreshments, while the people serving you suddenly get into character and all the action takes place around the tables.

There’s a different 15 minute episode every week, and if it rains it all moves into the studio so they never cancel!

It’s called Weekenders, and writer, director and narrator Kirk Foster told us more about it!

What is Weekenders?

Kirk: Many years ago I had the idea of doing a soap opera in a café. The original thought was that it would be a lunchtime event where people could come and have their meal but the waiters and waitresses serving them were actually the characters in the soap opera. A few years ago, when we gained more access to the Courtyard here, we thought it would be a good idea to do it outside in the summer.

How do the performances work?

Kirk: There’s a bar here and what happens when people arrive is that they sit down and the waiters and waitresses serve them but they [the serving staff] are the actors. Then a bell rings, the narrator comes out onto the fire escape and starts narrating the piece and the actors just do the piece around the tables. They involve the audience sometimes, but it’s not the sort of participation where the audience have got to be involved.

There’s also no admission fee, we ask people to donate if they want to, but it’s only 15 minutes long and it’s just a nice little break during a Sunday and slowly building up a cult following.

Is there a continuing story?

Kirk: The episodes are linked but the narration starts off every week with the story so far, so we explain roughly what’s happening very quickly but each episode is self contained so if you miss one or two, it really doesn’t matter.  But we do have a couple of ladies who now actually plan their holiday around Weekenders because the first year they missed the last episode which infuriated them.

How many are in the cast?

Kirk:  Usually there are four actors and they play at least two characters each during the 15 minute episode.

When do they get their scripts?

Kirk:  The week before.

So they have a week to learn it?

Kirk:  Yes – then we rehearse it for a couple of hours on the Sunday morning. The audience arrive at 12.30 and we do the performance at 1.15 - then they walk off with the scripts for next week.

Does that work OK or are there moments of crisis?!

Kirk: Well, because the narrator is reading it, and that’s me, I can actually follow it and help, and make things up, but it goes amazingly smoothly. It is very over the top with the acting and everything and we do get a lot of audience reaction so that gives the actors and the narrator a couple of moments to think something like “we’ll go here now” or “we’ll do this”! So it’s quite spontaneous on the day. We have a plan, and we have a script but it doesn’t always stay that way! It does evolve and change during the course of the morning’s rehearsal and during the performance.

It’s called a soap but it takes it onto a different level really doesn’t it?

Kirk: It’s taking the mickey out of every soap opera really, but it’s grown to such an extent that it is so ridiculous. There’s a murder every week, and a couple of pregnancies every week – it’s just totally absurd! But the audience seem to absolutely love it!

The narration aspect is very important, it’s like a 1950s detective story. The narrative aspect is a very old concept of course and with soap opera being a newish concept, it’s actually mixing the two together.

But the Market Theatre is quite well-known for its absurdity. It’s great following comes from the adult panto that we have every year and that’s the same sort of mad humour. But at no time do the actors think it’s funny! They think it’s very serious and very tragic so they’re in a tragedy and not a comedy and that’s what makes it work for the audience.

And you can take the fact that people are having affairs and getting murdered etc in soaps and take it to a more ridiculous level ?

Kirk: Yes – although some of the feedback we’ve had from the audience is that what I think is slightly absurd, is something that was in last week’s episode of such and such [soap] so we’re having to move the boundaries of absurdity further out which is good fun as well. It became quite obvious after the first couple of weeks that there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go – we can be as mad as we want!

Weekenders is just one part of the Market Theatre’s ethos of providing original and entertaining work to try and attract people to the theatre, who may not normally go?

Kirk: Yes - we try and have a nice variety. On Monday evenings we have a musical cabaret, on Wednesdays there’s an historical play about a young Queen Victoria and then there’s an adult comedy revue on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and Weekenders on a Sunday, so hopefully there is something going on at the Market Theatre that will interest everybody.

Even our shows in the evening are only an hour long, so what people tend to do is come and watch the show, go and have a meal and still get a drink in afterwards! We’re trying to make sure that theatre is part and parcel of life rather than just for a special occasion. And they can’t say “oh, I’ve seen that before” because all the plays are written here for the Market Theatre. As long as we do our job properly nobody gets bored.

We still have the seats in rows in the theatre [in the normal way] but it’s a very intimate place and the staff make everybody welcome so that when people come we try to make sure that they think they’re very special. This is their community theatre, so it’s very informal, and very archaic. The tickets are on the door, so you don’t have to pay beforehand, and we write the tickets out by hand, so we’ve kept that archaic intimacy going.

Some 76 per cent of the population do not go to live theatre, and they’re the people we want to get in. Theatre has a lot to answer for – did people stop coming to us or have we alienated them in some way?