THE Newcastle Emlyn theatre company is taking to the airwaves in a bid to outsmart the coronavirus pandemic.

The town’s Attic Theatre at the Cawdor Hall has been unable to stage live productions during the current crisis and with no return to the stage in the foreseeable future, members have come together to record an audio drama.

‘The Committee’, written by company member Melanie Davies, is, appropriately, a story based on an amateur dramatic society whose members are not quite as innocent as they may seem.

“ We usually stage three productions a year and although we’ve put monologues and poems on our website and Facebook page, we were really missing working together. We feel that our audiences might like to know that we haven’t given up and intend to be a continuous presence in the town in the future.

“We couldn’t find a suitable script for an audio drama, so I decided to write something that would include lots of members and be a dramatic listen for our audience”.

Melanie is not giving too much away in keeping the plot pretty close to her chest but admits there are ‘dark twists’ as the drama unfolds and an awful secret is uncovered.

The 40-minute production is directed by Claire Woolley. “ We have been rehearsing for about 3 months, following all social distancing and Covid rules. I haven’t directed before and this play has a big cast of 11, so it was a challenge; but at least being an audio play, there was no costume or set to consider! Melanie wrote Power and Petticoats for the Attic Theatre in 2018 which was such a success, so we were delighted to have another of her scripts to work on. It has been really uplifting for us all to work together again on something creative”.

Pete Mount is responsible for sound production. “It is a very different task creating the soundscape for an audio drama. You have to build pictures for the ears”.

The Committee will be going online in the next couple of weeks. People will be able to access it through the Attic Theatre Facebook page and their website attictheatre.wales.

“People will be able to make donations, but we understand that money is tight and if people cannot afford to pay anything, that is fine.”

Following on from ‘The Committee’, the group is working on a production of JB Priestley’s ‘Dangerous Corner’ which it hopes will be available after Christmas.