The 55th annual Rye Arts Festival is set to be the finest vintage for drama, with five top quality plays gracing the town.
First up, on Sunday 13 September, is Rye Writes – six of the best, fabulous, newly written,10-minute plays performed by Rye Players who keep going from strength to strength. If you like small plates, you’ll enjoy this menu of short plays, which were selected after a global competition and are wide ranging in format, style and content! There will be two performances at Rye Community Centre, but tickets are already selling like hot cakes, so secure yours now!
A week later on 20 September the Festival welcomes back Gerard Logan who has delivered some powerful, one-man performances in the past. This year, at Rye Community Centre, he will be telling supernatural stories that will get spines tingling. Gerard will tell two stories by EF Benson, the Rye writer of Mapp and Lucia, who was also one of England’s most prolific and best writer of ghost stories. Hauntings is a matinee show, so you will be able to go home while it is still light!
On Thursday 24 The Priest’s Tale, is an emotional one-man-show, written and performed by Michael Mears which tells the story of a Dutch priest who was held captive in Japan and survived the Hiroshima nuclear blast. The performance has been sponsored by Rye’s Quakers.
Two nights later, on Saturday 26 September, The Tudor Room at the The Mermaid will host The Last Flapper. This one-woman monologue has Rye’s wonderful professional actress Hayley-Marie Axe playing Zelda Fitzgerald in a sanatorium on the last day of her life. Zelda was married to Scott F Fitzgerald and was the muse behind The Great Gatsby, and their troubled marriage was deeply destructive. There will be two performances – one in the late morning and also a matinee.
Last, but far from least, Mike Hatchard, who is a man of many parts, will perform Ludwig: Unfinished Business, which is currently playing to sell-out audience at Edinburgh Fringe Festival! This tragi-comedy, bioplay, musical about Beethoven is written and performed to get laughs but is underpinned by Mike’s virtuoso piano playing! What better way to close the Festival for this year?
For more information and to secure your tickets go to ryeartsfestival.org.uk
Image Credits: Rye Arts Festival .