Cheap Thrills.
Theatre on a shoestring.

Short, sharp theatre plays written to be so easy and so inexpensive to stage that anyone can do it anywhere. Ideal for festivals and scratch nights.

Sexy, bizarre, gruesome, gory. Inspired by the legendary French theatre of horror and the bizarre, the Theatre of the Grand Guignol.

Not safe for anybody.

The point.

Armed with with a bunch of similarly minded weirdos I've been making anthologies of short plays in the spirit of the Geand Guignol and presenting them in small, local, community spaces. This has a bunch of advantages:

• If we're staying local we can work around actors' work and other commitments.
• If we're travelling to the audience then they can walk to the performance and walk home. We're environmental!
• Venues tends to be a lot cheaper than "proper" theatres (although obviously you don't get the same resources). Lower costs = lower ticket prices. People are skint these days, especially the young. It all helps.
• The anthology structure lessens the risk of purchase - again, people are skint - if you don't like one piece there's another one coming in ten minutes.

We're essentially Rural Touring, which is a thing, except we're following in the footsteps of comedy nights and band nights, so the crowd's a bit younger and livelier.

So, Cheap Thrills was born (for my scripts, I'm not the only writer, but I can hardly go throwing other people's scripts around):

A Cheap Thrills script has:

• Small cast - maximum four.
• Inexpensive to produce - as close to zero as possible. No complex sets, no complex costumes.
• No dependence on lighting or technical - seriously, we have done shows under fluorescent strip lights.
• Simple to stage.
• Ideally the entire production fits into one car.

The dream is that it will be an encouragement to people to try it for themselves. We're old enough to remember "This is a chord. This is another. Now start a band.".

Here's a script. Here's another one. Now go make a show.

A punk theatre. Is the dream.

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Why Grand Guignol?

It lasted sixty years, it was massively popular right up until someone messed with the formula.

It leant itself to essentially a gig theatre - in our own recreation we literally have a set list, we literally create "albums" of shows. It's a resilient, flexible format that was hugely popular for about forty years (from 1940 onward we can argue it was a museum piece but that can be discussed below). Audiences loved it, governments hated it. Good enough for us.

Plays.

They all run around ten minutes, they're all intended to be compact and easy to stage. We've toured most of these packing the entire show into two cars.

Aegyptus Birdseed Bon Appetit Daddy Issues Dobre Den Mrs Wilson Ho Ho Ho Honeyrose and Hayseed A Peg or Two The Right One

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Ruminations.

Pieces about the Grand Guignol, and theatre, and fear, in general. They are all works in progress - I learn something new almost every day, so no guarantee they're finished and no guarantee they're right.

A single postcard | Fear in Theatre (wip) | The Opening Night (wip) | Oscar Metenier | Maxa! Princess of Blood (wip)

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Toys! Shameless traffic grabs.

Toys to encourage traffic. I have no shame.

Obey the magic ball! * Numerology. The (not so) secret power of numbers!

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Contact.

webpage@cheapthrills.org.uk

Youtube

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