Something in Common

Groombridge and Withyham 2007
Performed at Hale Court Farm, Withyham, East Sussex
18th to 30th June, 2007

The play starts in 1831 with the audience becoming accomplices to an illicit prize-fight. Everywhere traders, musicians, escapologists, magicians, arm wrestlers vie for attention.

Inside and out farm labourers are gathered in groups. There is a sense that something is brewing. Soon hayricks are burning and farm machines are being smashed; events that begin what is to be a fifty-year struggle between landowners, tenant farmers and labourers as they try to come to terms with the dramatic changes of an industrial revolution.

The Honourable, the Reverend Reginald Sackville West, later the Earl De La Warr sacks the West Gallery Quire as part of his quest to bring morality and order. So begins his own journey of trying to hold things together. From this dawn of discontent come the railways and an influx of strangers. This story, with contemporary resonance, is about how a community survived.

Two years in the making Jon Oram’s epic story is drawn from the people of Withyham Parish and Old Groombridge past and present. Every character really existed but this is a fantasy tale woven from facts. A cast of 130 local people envelop, involve and enthral the promenading audience. Strong traditional music blends with the action as rioters, trains and runaway pigs move through the audience along with elegant weddings, exotic gardens and the arrival of the new buildings of Groombridge on the backs of navvies

This is a not-to-missed production by the founders and leading exponents of community plays in collaboration with a community re-establishing its relationship with its own unique and remarkable past and in the process discovering we all have something in common.