Winter week of rep at the Little Theatre

SHERINGHAM Little Theatre - known for its popular summer 'rep' season - is adding a winter week of professional drama too.

Sheringham Little Theatre is staging two plays from Alan Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges series - which all begin the same way, then veer off in different directions.

Actors Christine Lawrence and Simon Stanhope, who have appeared in previous summer seasons at the venue, will play up to eight characters in the plays, both centred on a school with an alcoholic headmaster,

his neurotic wife and a saucy-but-sweet home help - and with the

action beginning in the potting

shed.

One Man Protest has love and lust amid the marital misunderstandings, while A Cricket Match sees passions erupting in the pavilion.

Theatre director Debbie Thompson said the theatre had been running a summer rep since the 1960s, initially with an outside company, but took it 'in house' three years ago.

'That has proved very successful financially and artistically. And we have people asking why it has to be just in the summer,' she added.

Coincidentally the two actors, operating as the Two By Two theatre company, offered the plays, so the venue is trying an 'early rep' week next month - with plans to bring them back as part of the summer rep, with another two of the Intimate Exchanges plays - and looking at doing other weeks at other times of the year if the out-of-season experiment is a success.

One Man Protest runs on February 9, 10 and 13, and a Cricket Match on February 11, 12 and 14, with a special Valentine's treat of a floral gift for women in the last-night

audience.

Tickets and information on the shows, which include matinees, from the box office on 01263 822347.