Rude Mechanicals join Festival of Chichester fun

Dates include the Festival of Chichester: Sun, July 16, Halnaker, PO18 0QH, Halnaker Park Cottage. Also: July 19, Slaugham Ruins, Slaugham Place, Staplefield Road, Slaugham, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, RH17 6A; July 23, Sussex Prairie Garden, Henfield, West Sussex, BN5 9AT.

Pete Talbot, who set them up after a long career as a teacher, is delighted to be back on the road, this year with Miss Popplewell's Garden. It's April 1940 and Jocasta, Daphne and Dotty have to move from their school in idyllic Little Inkling, Sussex, to Buckinghamshire, where they will take refuge from the war. Lessons are suspended and they have two weeks left to have some fun and say goodbye to their friends.

It’s a production that will see the company doing what the company does best – touring our rural venues.Dates include: “It is the 25th year since we founded the company,” Pete says, “and I think there are a couple of key things about how we've survived and I think it is partly the decision to do rural touring. The alternative is to perform in theatres and go on the conventional theatre circuit but if you do that, only a certain number of people that are going come and see you, and if you choose to work with partners like theatres then they are going to want something like 30 per cent which means 30 per cent less money for us. I don't mean to sound selfish but that's the difference between survival and not. Because we're doing brand-new work we are not necessarily commercial. It's not the stuff that brings in the vast majority of people to conventional theatres. Most people want to go to the theatre to see something they have heard of already with famous actors. It's a relatively small proportion of the population that would risk going to see a brand-new play with no one that they know. And so gradually early on I decided that we would stick to rural touring and build up our own audience. We've now got 7,000 to 8,000 followers.