Orchard Theatre Company (active 1968-2000)

The Orchard Theatre was a professional rural touring company set up to serve the north Devon community. The company originated with a group of second year students at East 15 Acting School, trained in Joan Littlewood's methodology, who ran a pilot scheme for a north Devon ensemble theatre company in the summer of 1968. Andrew Noble, who lived in North Devon, was the driving force behind the company and it was he who named the group for the last line in John Arden’s play ‘Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance’: ‘Let’s start an orchard.’ Other members of the group were Alison Steadman, Peter Armitage and Millie Sidaway. The group presented a variety of plays and projects in 1968 including ‘Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance’, Jean Claude Van Itallie's ‘Almost Like Being’ and ‘War Games’, ‘Edwardian Delights’ (music hall) and ‘Pirates’ (an interactive children's project). They also collaborated with John Fox and Sue Gill’s fledgling Welfare State company on ‘The tide is right for the 30th’, a happening on the beach at Instow.

John Lane and Harland Walshaw of the Beaford Centre (founded by Lane in 1966; later known as Beaford Arts), recognised the quality and versatility of the group and secured a Foundation Grant from the Dartington Hall Trust to set up the Orchard Theatre as a regional peripatetic theatre company, with its administrative base at the Beaford Centre. John Lane’s philosophy for the revitalisation of north Devon in the 1960s was inspired by the agricultural, educational and artistic activity of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst and their Dartington Hall community of the 1920s and 1930s, which was home to Michael Chekhov’s theatre group.

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