All great ideas are dreamt up over a cup of coffee.

And this couldn’t be more true than at The Orchard Theatre, Dartford, where Terri McCann (Creative Learning Manager) and Emma Bond (Director of its community partner Sing Together) devised a new community project, The Orchard Co-operative.

During Covid, Emma kept her community choir motivated by offering daily sing-a-long sessions and stayed in touch with her drama students by developing online plays and presenting dramatic script read throughs. Post Covid, there was a clear opportunity to help newly graduated actors and performers gain experience and expand their professional credentials. The Orchard Co-operative was created in response to this.

It all started with Behind the Curtain: an immersive experience that took participants on a tour of the Orchard Theatre where they met ‘the people who work there’ including Alice the unhappy Marketing Officer whose degree in Digital Marketing had been reduced to changing posters, the flirtatious bar staff who talked about their nights out, and the usher who had a lot to say about the Dartford Theatre  ghost. And so it went on!

All the actors created and performed their own 5 minute pieces for this project and were given a profession credit and a profit share.

Next, was Mind the Gap, a story about commuters travelling on the London to Brighton train. This time, the audience where part of the experience by being on the train with the performers. They met Norman the dog, the hungover socialite, and the disgruntled tannoy announcer who had a lot to say about the working conditions.

Finally, and most recently, was a performance of Bobby’s Bench. This piece was centred around a memorial bench, and featured people who knew Bobby during his life, and those for whom this bench came to symbolise hope. The story also explored homelessness and local authority policies around it.

The Orchard Co-operative continues to go from strength to strength. Behind the Curtain was performed at The Churchill Theatre in Bromley, and Bobby’s Bench will play there in January 2024.

The next steps are to hopefully develop this initiative across the Group as either community projects to be performed by local actors or as studio pieces with a community interest.