Absolutely no one needs reminding what a rubbish year this has been work-wise for creatives.

However, our Managing Director (and one of our writers), Rachel O'Neill, had some encouraging successes in the past year.  She was Runner-Up Best Original Monologue for The Studio, Salisbury Monologue Competition (and final five for best performance, about 4 mins in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBb6DI6-3Y (trigger warning: implied violence), 'Sir Walter's Women' was performed by The South Devon Players Theatre & Film Company, Brixham in November.

Rachel's original audio drama made the final five of the RAF Benevolent Fund's competition with 'Eager for the Air', based on the founding of the all-female branch of the ATA, and her 10-minute piece 'Kit-Kats and Cider' was read by the Writing Doesn't Have To Be Lonely team.

She has been invited to be part of Theatre Royal Winchester's new writing group, and was a Finalist in the recent monologue competition for Green Curtain Theatre with 'Oona'.
which will be filmed later this year.

Links to reviews:

Sardines Magazine - Lewd Women and Female Felons and The Fasting Girl

Scene 1 Plus - Lewd Women and Female Felons

Scene 1 Plus - The Fasting Girl

This is just a selection of the responses to Lewd Women and Female Felons
A powerful performance about the criminalization of poor women with illegitimate children in Georgian England. The use of ballads: brilliant! This research material was woven together in Lewd Women, which turned the tragic history of women and their children incarcerated in the County Bridewell into an extraordinarily poignant acknowledgement and tribute, in the very palce some of them were buried in unmarked graves.
I’ll never forget the beautiful ballad solo sung by Eleanor Marsden! As a member of the audience said  - ‘if you make a CD of the music from the show, there’s a guaranteed audience’.
Emma Clery

Another triumph, so deftly humanising a historical subject with skilful touches despite the scantiest of available information...
Wonderfully done and beautifully produced!
Plaudits, bouquets and five-star reviews...
Philip and Lizzie Glassborow

Thanks to you and the cast for presenting such a striking preview of the new drama. As you saw from the audience reaction, to have the story presented in dramatic form was extraordinarily powerful.
Steve Marper

What a fabulous, intimate, thought-provoking and resonant production it was today- amazing voices, both spoken, but particularly sung and so poignant and political, especially when you drew attention to the parlous state of UK prisons today. I so  look forward to seeing the themes expanded and evolving over the next few months. ...The solos were incredibly moving, added greatly to each characterisation and definitely affect the audience on another level.  I was reminded of West Side Story and how some of the really tricky urban deprivation messages in that script are communicated so effectively with song and dance. Mixed media adds so much vibrancy and throws the awful, inhuman constraints of normative "justice" into sharp relief.
Kate Watkins

Your play made a deep impression on me. Of course one knows as a fact how these girls suffered, but you really brought them to life. Congratulations!
Alys Blakeway

I was utterly utterly absorbed by your drama. There was a time-slip just as if a door to the 18th and 19th centuries had opened.  Everyone around me was riveted. I felt particularly overcome with emotion when Fanny and baby Rebecca Oliver were mentioned. It was as if I knew them so it was personal. The cast were so convincing...the lewd women were wonderful and their singing too. How clever of you to intersperse the dialogue with authentic songs of the time and to write new ones in the same vein. It must be presented to the wider public.
Norma Goodwin

Beatrice Shilling was a pioneering engineer in Britain’s race to dominate the skies at the start of WWII.   Obsessed with speed, she raced motorbikes and gained an MSc in Electrical Engineering, marking her out as an unusual woman from the start.   Working at RAE, she invented the solution to the design flaw that caused the deaths of British pilots when their Spitfires lost engine power and spiralled out of control during dogfights with the Luftwaffe.

Her simple gadget was cheekily known as ‘'Miss Shilling’s Orifice’. This small object was fitted to the Merlin engine, allowing the Spitfire to engage on equal terms with German planes thereby helping the RAF to gain dominance in the crucial aerial conflicts of the war.
 
Rachel O'Neill, writer, said: "This is a one-act play which was first staged at Nuffield City Space Studio as  a 'work in progress' as part of the Make It SO Season, featuring emerging writers and artists from Hampshire. This is the next iteration of the play and features professional Hampshire actors, Stacy Hart and Francesca McCrohon.  It’s directed by Dan O’Neill, whose work was most recently seen as the movement director for the Channel 4 series, Humans. and upcoming TV shows Alex Rider and Worzel Gummidge. This play is in stark contrast to my previous play, Sir Walter's Women, but both deal with the unseen and personal lives of their protagonists."
 
Tilly and The Spitfires aims to tell the story of Tilly’s groundbreaking discovery, of her intimate relationship with her friend Muriel, and her frequent clashes with those in authority as she strives to make her voice heard in a war run by men. ​

The performance takes place at Winchester Discovery Centre, 21 September, 8pm. Admission is free but booking in advance is advised.

In the popular imagination, John Keats’s stay in Winchester in August and September of 1819 was a touristy sojourn, involving long walks along the picturesque water meadows that stretch either side of the River Itchen down to the medieval hospital of St Cross, and culminating in the composition of ‘To Autumn’. In reality, Keats was in the middle of a last-ditch effort to make money from his pen, conscious of the fact that without significant improvement in his finances, he could not marry his fiancée Fanny Brawne. Earlier in July, Keats had left London with Brown for the Isle of Wight, where they worked together in Shanklin on a tragedy, Otho the Great, intended to showcase the talents of the greatest tragic actor of the age, Edmund Kean. Shanklin had soon begun to grate on Keats, however, and he missed a ‘tolerable library’. After a few weeks, with new hope, he and Brown decamped to Winchester.

What is drawn out so powerfully by Cecily O’Neill’s splendid play for 2TimeTheatre about Keats’s stay in the market city, ‘A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester’, directed by Rachel O’Neill and introduced by Professor Chris Mulvey, is the sense of desperation that quickly began to settle on the poet as Summer drifted into early Autumn. News arrived that Kean was unavailable, dashing Keats’s hopes of a lucrative Drury Lane success. The poet was left pinning his hopes on a new romance, Lamia, which he tried to convince himself had ‘that sort of fire in it’ that would take hold of readers. He was love-sick and, ominously, the sore throat that had plagued him on and off for over a year returned.

Young actors Teddy Morris and Joshua MacGregor did a wonderful job of projecting and performing these tensions, desires and disappointments. Morris inhabited Keats’s overheated, increasingly pessimistic imagination in Winchester with aplomb, and MacGregor was equally convincing as the eternally optimistic, gregarious Brown. The pair’s word-perfect rendering of technically demanding passages from Keats’s poetry and letters was remarkable, and fully realised the ambitions of O’Neill’s hour-long, well-attended play, which pulled off the not inconsiderable trick of distilling events and emotions from across that difficult summer into a single animated conversation between Keats and Brown.

The bantering energies, shared enthusiasms and loyalties of the pair’s friendship were transferred from page to stage in fine style. Naturally, ‘A Fruitful Season’ paid homage to Keats’s most celebrated achievement in Winchester: the settled achievement of the ode ‘To Autumn’; but – and absolutely rightly – the ode’s seductive sonorities were not allowed to smooth over the angst and self-doubt that marked Keats’s visit to the market city. The audience was left with the poet’s overwhelming sense of failure and lack of legacy.

Musical accompaniment was ably provided by guitarist Owen Feeney and singer Polly Perry, including a performance of Rob Sword’s hauntingly lovely original setting of Keats’s lines ‘Ever let the Fancy roam’. The stone and wood-panelled acoustics of St Lawrence’s Church lent everything a mesmerising clarity and presence. It’s to be hoped that O’Neill’s play will receive another outing. It fully deserves one.

Richard Marggraf Turley

​The Keats Foundation Newsletter June 2019

​ 
 
Casting announced for A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester
Winchester actors take centre stage
 
Local Winchester actor, Teddy Morris, will be playing the part of Keats in 2TimeTheatre’s upcoming production of A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester. He joins recent Rose Bruford graduate Joshua MacGregor who plays Keats’ friend Charles Brown in this unique celebration of the poet’s visit to Winchester in 1819.
He and his friend Brown found it: ‘The pleasantest town I was ever in.’
 
Teddy was born and bred in Winchester and was a member of Encore Youth Theatre and took the role of Hamlet in Discarded Nut’s professional production staged in 2017.  Joshua has close ties to Winchester, with a grandfather and other family members living in the city.
 
Local musicians, singer Polly Perry (of Polly and the Billet Doux and Polly Gone Wrong), and guitarist Owen Feeney also join the cast. They will be performing Keats’ poetry set to music composed by Rob Sword.
 
The world premiere of A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester is directed by Rachel O’Neill and introduced by Professor Christopher Mulvey of the English Project. It is part of The Winchester Festival’s 2019 season.
 
2TimeTheatre’s previous productions for Winchester Festival include Venus and Adonis, Meeting Miss Austen and An Honest Soldier.
 
Performances are on Saturday 6 July and Sunday 7 July at 3.00pm at St Lawrence’s Church. Tickets £12 from the Winchester Cathedral Box Office 01962 857276 and on-line at www.tickets.winchester-cathedral.org.uk
 
For more information, press tickets and headshots, please contact Rachel O‘Neill, 2timetheatre@gmail.com, 07821879094.
 
Photo caption:
Teddy Morris Keats and Joshua MacGregor is Brown. Photo credit: Amazing Image Company

 
About 2TimeTheatre
 
2TimeTheatre's performance arm was launched in October 2013 with a theatre production of Young Jane, based on the early writings of a young Jane Austen and adapted by Cecily O'Neill followed by her adaptation of Venus and Adonis (2016). Publications include Young Jane (September 2016), followed by Drinking with Dorothy. Meeting Miss Austen, the second collection of plays based on the Juvenilia, was published May 2017 and performed as part of the Winchester Festival in July 2017. Other productions include Jane Austen and The Waterman (2017) and An Honest Soldier (2018). Sir Walter’s Women by Rachel O’Neill was staged at The Great Hall September 2018, and Tilly and the Spitfires also by Rachel O’Neill, at NST in 2019. www.2timetheatre.com

News Release: 2 May 2019 
 
A new production celebrating Keats’ visit to Winchester 200 years ago
​
John Keats is one of England’s best-loved poets. The beauty of his poems and his tragically short life make him an intensely romantic figure.  A Fruitful Season: Keats in Winchester celebrates his visit to the city in the autumn of 1819.  He and his friend Charles Armitage Brown found it: ‘The pleasantest town I was ever in.’
 
Drawn entirely from Keats’ letters and poems, the script includes his delightful descriptions of Winchester, an account of the writing of his most popular poem Ode to Autumn, and his obsessive love for his ‘Bright Star’ Fanny Brawne.
 
Keats’ months in Winchester mark his last great burst of poetic creativity, before the disease that killed his brother took hold. He died of consumption at the age of 25, believing that his work would soon be forgotten.
 
Writer Cecily O’Neill said: “I already knew and loved the great Odes and dramatic poems, but working on the script of A Fruitful Season, I discovered that Keats’ great ambition was to become a successful playwright. While he was here, he worked on a tragedy with Brown, who also features in the play. It was accepted at Drury Lane Theater (sic) but never staged, so I feel I am honouring his ambition with this production.”
 
With original music by Robert Sword and performed by professional actors, this world premiere is introduced by Professor Christopher Mulvey of the English Project.
 
2TimeTheatre’s previous productions for Winchester Festival include Venus and Adonis, Meeting Miss Austen and An Honest Soldier.
 
Performances are on Saturday 6 July and Sunday 7 July at 3.00pm at St Lawrence’s Church. Tickets £12 from the Winchester Cathedral Box Office 01962 857276 and online at www.tickets.winchester-cathedral.org.uk
 
For more information, press tickets and headshots, please contact Rachel O‘Neill, 2timetheatre@gmail.com, 07821879094.