Festival 2019

Woodlands celebrated its 50th anniversary season with two entries at this year’s Nidderdale and District Drama Festival. We proudly finished as festival runners-up with a performance of Wilf Hashimi’s ‘Saving for Dolphins’, a sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, but ultimately disturbing play about the tribulations of a man on the autistic spectrum who is befriended, with murderous consequences, by a ‘Good Samaritan’. The production was superbly directed and choreographed by Julie James. Howard Atkin, portraying the hapless protagonist Simon with great intensity, earned the ‘Best Actor’ trophy and the production garnered the ‘Best Producer’ award for Julie James as well as the Michael Wade trophy for ‘Artistic Originality’, the Garth Rawson ‘Runner-Up trophy’ and the Betty Clarke ‘Audience Award’ for the most popular performance.

Our other production was ‘Our Man’ by Daniel Clucas. The play portrays a soldier’s day from the perspective of the individual senses in his head and was a bold piece of programming by Mark Smith.  Congratulations to Brian Hey who earned a best actor nomination for his performance as ‘Mouth’.