Theatre Company’s Plans For Tour

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30938, 20 December 1965, Page 16

Theatre Company’s Plans For Tour

(New Zealand Press Association) WELLINGTON, December 19. The New Zealand Theatre Centre will tour its first production, “The Comedy of Errors,” early next year, with seven overseas actors featured with a local cast.

Afterwards, starting in May, the centre will promote an extensive tour of Downstage’s “Oh What a Lovely War." It will also hold a school for professional actors starting on January 17 in Wellington, with top-class tutors including Gareth Morgan, of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-on-Avon, and Romney Brent, American actor and film director. The school will be held at the Victoria University

Theatre and immediately afterwards Morgan and Clifford Williams will open rehearsals for “The Comedy of Errors.” Local Tours Three New Zealand actors overseas are among the seven who will come here for the production—Barbara Ewing, Alice Fraser and Jonathan Hardie. It will be based on the Stratford-on-Avon production in 1962 which was so successful that it was revived a year later and then taken to London, the Continent and the United States. The theatre centre is also completing arrangements to buy an Auckland building for renovation into a theatre to accommodate the Auckland Regional Professional Theatre. A regional professional theatre is to be established in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, with each conducting local tours, and also swapping their bigger successes. “Sails are set for a busy year,” said Mr G. T. Wiggs, chairman of the Trust Board.