Theatre group tees off with trial at town golf club

A new venture which brings together the worlds of theatre and golf is being trialled at Knaresborough Golf Club.

The club will provide an occasional home for plays and sketches performed by Harrogate Dramatic Society, as part of a plan to expand its entertainment programme.

For the theatre company it offers a potential new audience where it can develop performances and try out new stage ideas, including its first - a short comedy, presented as part of a wining and dining evening.

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Because of the new Covid19 restrictions, the show has been deferred until a later date. The current plan is then to perform it in two ‘houses’ to accommodate the anticipated limited audience numbers.

After the first house, in which a meal is followed by the play, the audience will be cleared, the chairs and tables cleaned and sanitized, then the second audience admitted for the next house.

The opening show, I Never Thought it Would Be Like This, will be done as a Radio Play, with four characters working in front of a microphone each. The half hour story is set on a desert island.

The idea for the partnership grew out of the Club’s Centenary celebrations, launched last December, when the Dramatic Society staged a re-enactment of the found of the Golf Club.

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Judith Howe, one of the directors with Harrogate Dramatic Society, said: “Following the success of the Centenary project, both the golf club and HDS felt that it would be a good idea to continue to work together on more projects.

“We have lots of other ideas, from ‘A Pie, A Pint and a Play’ to a Murder Mystery Evening. We hope that by working together we can benefit both societies.”

Knaresborough Golf Club’s entertainment chairman, Graeme Sharpe, said they had been keen to widen the range of entertainment they could offer, though Covid restrictions were making it difficult to run a full a programme.

“We will go on planning, conscious that eventually we will manage to present shows and entertainment, either restricted or hopefully unrestricted,” said Mr Sharpe. “As they say – the show must go on, though not quite to the schedule we’d hoped for.”