Fearlessly Funny

Northern Comedy Theatre is a relatively new company having been formed on Merseyside in 2015 with the aim of cheering us all up and boy have they succeeded during 2020. Rather than just see the pandemic as a hindrance they have embraced the opportunities presented by taking themselves online and produced (literally) a stream of work of no less than seven online plays.

Five of these formed a series called “Doing….” in which they examined how the UK had been forced to take its leisure activities online and make the best of a bad job in order to carry out their hobbies Thus they examined amateur dramatics, book clubs, online quizzes and murder mystery evenings. As a coda they also tried their hand at the online business meeting. In two “specials” they tackled both Halloween and Christmas. All the shows used a core team of six young actors who formed a tight knit repertory company which exuded fun at every turn.

The scripts for all these shows were supplied by close collaborator, David Spicer, and their Artistic Director, Shaun Chambers, masterminded all the different pieces.

All shows were first performed live using the burgeoning technology of the Zoom platform in a praiseworthy attempt to replicate the experience of live theatre. Subsequently filmed (but unedited) versions of the seven plays emerged and can be found on the Scenesaver platform – www.scenesaver.co.uk.

Northern Comedy has shown great resilience in getting this collection of shows up and running and it is hard to think of another company or venue which has done so much in such a short space of time or has provided as much fun in the process.