Part of the Bedford Park Festival, at the Tabard Theatre
One of the highlights of the Bedford Park Festival is a production of Straight & Narrow - Theatre West 4 returns to W4, with a 25th anniversary production of Jimmie Chinn's West End comedy at the Tabard Theatre on Sunday.
TW4 was founded locally in 1964 and is happily still going strong. Here is a history of the theatre group written by Freddie Mauwer.
Because of the lack of suitable and affordable performance space in Chiswick we had to move away from Chiswick to perform our main shows although we are still basically a Chiswick based drama group who meet regularly at The Friendship Club, Age Concern, W4 and where we also put on our in-house studio performances with great success.
We used to perform at Chiswick Town Hall, our main production venue, and the last one there was our award winning production of 'Chicago' in 1994. The cost of the town hall with its limited facilities became prohibitive and the last venue we used in Chiswick was in fact the Tabard before their refurbishment programme the latest of which was 'The Wyrd Sisters' in 1998. Since then we had a base at the Polish YMCA, Ealing, where we put on a number of in-house studio presentations before performing our main productions at Questors Studio in 2000 with 'A Chorus of Disapproval' and ever since we have used their premises once or twice a year.
However, we were fortunate in that The Friendship Club at Age Concern Chiswick became available to us again a few years ago and we are now happily ensconced in that venue and where we meet regularly., thus having come back to our roots! We have recently presented a number of in-house productions with great success, the latest of which was a presentation of two of Jimmy Chinn's radio plays: 'From Here to the Library' and 'Pity about Kitty' earlier this year.
Our Spring Social this Saturday will include a presentation of scenes from Nell Dunn's 'Steaming' directed by our current Acting Director Hazel Collinson, who is a lecturer and teacher at the Arts Ed Schools in Chiswick.
June 15, 2012