Caught in the Act
Imagine you are a group of oddballs consisting of a less than bright fish seller, an ageing alcoholic, a mummy’s boy who has an allergy to cats and a taste for sadomasochism, a long-suffering common-law wife attempting to get pregnant ‘before it’s too late’ and the dissatisfied secret girlfriend of the mayor of a small Welsh town.
You have never acted before, can only meet if it’s at the local pub and have frittered away every penny ever given to you on frivolous luxuries. Now imagine that you have six weeks to produce and perform a Shakespearean play and convince the entire population of a town in Germany that you are an established,professional and artistic theatre company funded with £250,000.
Meet the so-called ‘Pontycel Players’ who suddenly find themselves entangled in a nightmare of their own construction and are led unto the breach by their Mayor, Eric Jenkins. For the last five years the council of Pontycelwyddau have been send large sums of money from Brussels to fund the cultural development in their town.
Instead they have used the money to fund holidays, a pool table, a fashionable car, one new bathroom with Jacuzzi, strip weekends in Amsterdam, two new building extensions, forty-five crates of Bollinger champagne, four hundred and twenty boxes of scampi fries and a bondage weekend in Cheltenham that nobody talks about.
On the night of their celebrations marking the end of their five years of undiscovered embezzlement, the council receive an unexpected visitor the cultural commissioner who has been faithfully sending the money to Pontycelwyddau under the impression that the proceeds had been spent on what, by now, should be a highly polished, prestigious theatre company. Eric must use his rakish charm to prevent the council’s fraudulent activities being discovered.
The town is also under threat from NBD, a voracious multi-national company which built the factory that looms malevolently over Pontycelwyddau. If the EU commission find out what has been going on then the council could be dissolved giving NBD the perfect opportunity to execute its merciless expansion plans. Pontycelwyddau originally grew up around the old mine, but when it closed down, NBD bought the land.
Now the company wants to demolish the town in order to increase its profits. The council is the only thing which stands in its way. Under the strain of their own personal traumas and conflicts, this endearingly funny group of people must work together if they are to save their town and their homes and put on a performance of Macbeth in front of a critical audience on the stage of the German town twinned with Pontycelwyddau.
Starring: Steve Speirs, Freddie Jones, Mark Lewis Jones, Anthony O’Donnell, John Weldon, Juliet Aubrey,Maxine Evans, Sarah Barrand, Judith Lewis Ian Virgo, Ralph Brown and Maureen Lipman.
Caught in the Act is released 5th December.