Poets’ Corner travelling to Austria

The poetic party moves to Innsbruck

Very exciting news from the whole PoCo team can now be confirmed. The play shall be going on a mini-tour to Austria in November.

During the Fringe the show was nominated amongst six others to get an all expenses paid trip to Innsbruck in Austria to be performed in a professional theatre in the centre of the city. Somehow it won and now the wheels are in motion to put together the company’s first international tour.

We arrive in Salzburg (where they filmed parts of “Sound of Music”) to dance around in the hills for a while before being taken to the city of Innsbruck for many meeting and greetings with various theatre types over there. Then there will be some promotional workshops/lectures about the play and the characters at the city’s University (they seem keen to offer the students some academic insights into the English poets and get them to come to the show under the pretense that they’ll learn something to help with their studies from it – ha).

After that is the shows – performed in a 220 seat theatre. Any profit goes straight to the company as the Austro-British Council insist on being a non-profit organisation. The play has to be made longer, and have an interval, which will be an interesting challenge over the next few weeks. We’re also going to be staying in a monastery, high in the mountains overlooking the city. It’s all a bit surreal really. It’s definitely not something that was expected from the Fringe run, but it is very welcome indeed. It shall be nice to see how the play translates to a country that has English as a second language, and the chance to get paid finally for doing what we usually do for free.

So it’s all rather exciting. It will involve missing a seminar or two, and a grovelling pleading request goes out to our lecturers that we can be allowed to do that for what is obviously a fantastic opportunity.

Time to invade Europe with Leeds theatre-ness!

The only disadvantage I can spot right now is that we have to fly Ryan Air…

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