About Stage Whispers

Somewhere right now, a committee treasurer is trying to figure out how to file a gift aid claim using a spreadsheet formula written by someone else back in 2007. A first-time director is wondering whether the actors at their auditions are judging them. A performer is learning lines in their car, gathering stares for their excessive gesturing. And a theatre manager is standing in an empty auditorium at midnight on a Tuesday, locking up after a show that twelve people came to see, wondering if it's all worth it.

It is. It really, really is.

That's why we're here.

The problem we kept seeing

Community theatre in the UK is extraordinary. Hundreds of groups, thousands of volunteers, tens of thousands of hours poured into something that nobody pays them to do. People build sets in their garages. They sew costumes at kitchen tables. They rehearse in draughty halls on Monday nights because that’s the only time when enough of the cast can make it.

And almost all of them are doing it in isolation.

Every group has its own way of doing things. Every new chair inherits a filing cabinet (metaphorical or, alarmingly often, literal) of old guff and has to work out governance, safeguarding, marketing, and finances almost from scratch. Every director walks into their first rehearsal room with enthusiasm and a plan that doesn’t survive contact with the actors, and nobody to call when it all falls apart on week three.

The knowledge exists. It's just trapped: in individual groups, in the memories of people who've retired from committees, in conversations at bar after strike night that nobody writes down.

What we wanted to do, what we needed to do, was to change that.

What Stage Whispers is

We're a community for the people who make local theatre work.

Not the critics or the funding bodies. And not the professionals who occasionally parachute in to tell amateurs how it's really done. We're here for the volunteers, because we are them. The ones who give their evenings, their weekends, their emotional reserves to something they love, and who deserve better than having to figure it all out alone.

We publish two newsletters, because the people who make shows and the people who run theatres have different needs (though plenty of you, we know, are doing both):

• Making Shows is for performers, directors, designers, and crew. Audition craft, rehearsal discipline, staging on a shoestring, surviving tech week with your sanity mostly intact.
• Making Theatre is for committees, venue managers, and the people holding it all together behind the scenes. Governance, programming, marketing, money, and how to keep your volunteers from burning out.

Everything we write comes from experience. Real stories from real theatres, with the failures left in, because the failures are usually where the useful bit is.

Why "amateur" is a word we're proud of

It comes from the Latin amare. To love.

We're not wannabe professionals who didn’t quite make it. We're not hobbyists playing at theatre. We're people who love this art enough to give our time, our energy, and frankly quite a lot of our furniture to it. That deserves respect. It deserves celebration.

The best community theatre is extraordinary. We've seen village halls transformed into other worlds. We've watched performers with no training at all break an audience's heart. We've sat in committees where volunteers solved problems that would stump professionals, because they had to, because there was nobody else, and because they cared enough to try.

That's not lesser. That's remarkable.

Who we are

At Stage Whispers, we’re drawing on decades of hands-on experience in community theatre: production, performance, venue management, committee governance, and all the unglamorous bits in between. We've directed shows where half the cast got laryngitis. We've chaired committees through delicate and existential crises. We've built shows out of shoestring and a plucky attitude that became treasured memories for the cast and audience alike. We've also got things spectacularly wrong, and we'll tell you about those too, because those tend to be the things we’ve learned the most from.

We're in the trenches with you, and we built this place so we could all stop solving the same problems over and over again in isolation.

So if you’re the one still painting flats at 10pm, or re-rigging lights the night before opening, or fighting every day to grow your membership to keep the shows flowing, then you’re our people. You are the heart of community theatre. And we’re here to make it a little bit easier.

Come and join us.