Arundel's Drip Action offers its December show online

Every December, they offer a seven-themed entertainment. The seven seas, the seven deadly sins and the seven dwarves have inspired past productions.

This time they turn to the seven magpies for a piece called One For Sorrow, Two For Joy… – a piece which they will deliver via Zoom but which will be linked to YouTube where the public can watch it.

You can tune in to see it live or catch it after the event. Details of how to watch are on the Drip Action website.

The show will be on December 11 at 7.30pm.

Artistic director Bill Brennan said: “Every December we try to do seven short plays, and somebody suggested that we do the magpies.

“Seven is a good neat number and we usually have it written by our Drip Action writers which means that we don’t have to worry about rights and licences if we are doing it ourselves, and so it has become a tradition for us.

“We have a variety of our regular writers, and Simon Brett always does one for us.

“The idea is that we all get together on Zoom and it then links through to YouTube. We did one before, in August, and we had a good number of people watching, and then people are asked to make donations if they want to.

“So it is seven new short plays, mostly monologues because that is easier for Zooming. They are about ten to 15 minutes each so we should get an hour and a half show.”

The rhyme goes One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told.

Bill’s own piece will be the silver – though he’s giving away nothing more than that until the night.

The advantage of YouTube, Bill explains, is that you will see only the person who is speaking, rather than the usual Zoom bank of faces.

The production will bring to an end a dismal year during which the best approach has been simply to do what you can.

“2020 has been a lost year,” Bill says.

“We haven’t done the Arundel Festival, we haven’t done the theatre trail, we haven’t done our evening production, and those are the big things for us.

“Arundel Festival did an online compilation, and we had an excerpt in that.

“But the idea is that we do our theatre trail next year, the same pieces we were hoping to do.

“But we have done bits and pieces just to show that we are still here. We just have to bite the bullet.

“Obviously, it has meant a loss of income, but it is not like we are a big professional company.

“There are so many showbusiness people out of work.”

In that respect the company was rather better off.

Plus Drip Action is preceded by its reputation.

Decades of work lie behind the company, and Bill is hoping that these will stand Drip Action in good stead until things can get back closer to normal.

“We are significantly established and significantly financially sound in our modest way, so it has been a year out really.

“But I hope the next full production, the way things are looking, could be next April and we would be back on track then.”

www.dripaction.com

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