It’s nearly a year since our amazingly successful big fundraising event, “Lane End Live!”. You might be thinking that not much has happened since then, but behind the scenes there has been a lot going on. This last year has been a busy one for the Theatre On The Row project. Most importantly, we applied for and obtained charitable status, so we are now formally “Friends of The Theatre On the Row”. We’ve also had fact-finding visits to existing open air theatres (see Kath Gill’s article on out visit to the BOAT in Brighton) and are beginning to formulate more concrete ideas on the kind of performance space that would work for our community here in Lane End. 

The past year has been one which has solidified our belief that open air spaces are essential for encouraging the performance arts in this village. The Lane End Players, our wonderful local theatre group have had some great successes with outdoor performances such as “Darling Buds of May”, the Christmas in the Village Nativity play, performances at Higginson Park, the Village Fete and so on. The LESA open air Jubilee music event was extremely well-attended. Yet, sadly, some indoor events have had to be cancelled due to COVID or have seen lower audience figures than expected. Outdoors is the way forward!

This summer we thought that having demonstrated how a big event like “Lane End Live!” could work, we’d go to the opposite end of the scale and give local residents a taste of the smaller, more intimate events that an open air space could be used for. So we decided to focus on the smallest members of our community with our story-telling sessions for children, “Once Upon a Summertime.” The first of these will take place on 17th August with the support of The Lane End Youth and Community Centre – details below!

We hope you like our new logo – created for us by award-winning designer Tara-Lee Hollander. It’s just the beginning of a whole new phase as we push onwards and upwards – watch this space!