Worthing-based theatre company still hoping for biggest tour yet

There’s not a lot more Ross Muir can do apart from hope and pray.
Ross MuirRoss Muir
Ross Muir

Ross, founder and artistic director of Conn Artists, the professional company in residence at Worthing’s Connaught Theatre, is hoping to take the company out on their longest tour so far next year.

Or at least that was the plan. For the moment, he’s just got to hope for the best.

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Ross was 70 per cent through booking a string of dates for their spring 2021 tour of Mary Rose by J M Barrie, a piece Ross describes as a spell-bindingly beautiful ghost story about time, love and loss from the creator of Peter Pan.

But inevitably everything is on hold at the moment – though we are getting closer and closer to the point where Ross will have to make a decision whether the tour will go ahead or not.

Ross suspects he can delay the decision on the tour until the end of September.

But it’s a fine line: he will need to leave enough time to promote the show and to put the show together.

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“We are supposed to open at the Connaught on February 28 and then tour until April 24. We usually go out for four weeks, but now that I have left the Connaught (where he used to work), I am really trying to build up Conn Artists.

“I have tried to take the positives and use this time to think about the future of the company, but to be honest, just before lockdown, this production was having the most interest of any of our productions.

“It was going great guns. It was booking really well. I had 70 per cent of it booked… and now I am struggling with the rest, with lots of venues with staff on furlough.”

Plus the fact, even if Ross did manage to book it, he still wouldn’t have a clue whether or not the show will go on.

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On the plus side, through the Arts Council’s emergency funding scheme, Ross has secured money to be mentored by Adrian McDougall, artistic director of Blackeyed Theatre Company: “I have been trying to model Conn Artists a bit on Blackeyed Theatre not in terms of their work necessarily but in terms of how I would like Conn Artists to go.

“He is a really interesting chap… and very giving.”

But now is a time of frustration: “I don’t really understand the government’s reasoning about theatres, and there is no real indication at this time when things might be able to go ahead. We have just got to hang in there and see how it goes.

“Everything is pretty much in place. I know who the cast will be. There are lots of things that could be ready quickly. I have just got five or six other dates to fill.

“We have been going as a company since 2013 but we have only been touring for the last few years.

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“We had Silas Marner last autumn, and we really took a big step forward with that, and that helped give me an insight into how I can see the potential for the company… and that was why I submitted my notice to Worthing Theatres and said that I wanted to commit 100 per cent to making this company work. And then the lockdown happened!

“But I know that our work is good and that we have had a lot of good feedback which has really encouraged me to believe a lot more in the company and in all that it is capable of doing.

“When we started, nobody knew us and we don’t have big-name actors and we choose pieces that are not obvious choices.

“But we are about doing interesting work that people won’t necessarily know.

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“But the weird thing is that we knew we were going to be doing Mary Rose when we were doing Silas Marner, but we didn’t know that I was going to lose my father last year and that there was going to be this pandemic.

“But Mary Rose is a play about love and loss… and it was written shortly after the Spanish flu pandemic…”