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"I remember coming out here ten years ago and it was raining the day we came to look at the site and have the vision for it and I remember being so despondent," said David Newborn, the producer at Red Rose Chain Film and Theatre Company.

"There were about eight of us in the first show and that was it. We didn't have any other facilities and were also doing the lights and making the coffee.

"We did two nights and got a lot of press coverage for it and ended up with 500 people a night."

It was 2000 when Red Rose staged UFO Bentwaters in a clearing in Rendlesham Forest just off the road between Woodbridge and Orford. The Arts Council was providing funding to take productions into 'unusual places', so Red Rose applied for it and got the money.

Theatre in the Forest

2009 sees the tenth production - Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale complete with the stage instruction 'Exit, pursued by a bear'. They're expecting to sell around 8,000 tickets over 6-30 August 2009 - not bad for a production that has to rely purely on ticket sales and sponsorship rather than grants and public funding.

"One of the elements we have out here is the weather. Over the ten years we have had some wet nights. I remember when Jo Carrick was singing her solo piece in Camelot in an absolute downpour and we've had blackouts where the actors had to carry on shining torches in each others' faces.

"The wet nights tend to be our most successful in a way because the actors feel sorry for the audience and vice versa and we have a sort of community. But we do have a sort of micro-climate out here so, even in wet summers such as 2008, we only had a little bit of rain one night."

Trying to reach the masses

Aside from Theatre in the Forest, Red Rose Chain uses its Ipswich base for projects with 'excluded' groups such as convicts at Hollesley Bay and Young Offenders Institution Warren Hill or class A drug addicts at the Iceni Project.

"One of the things we're interested in is making theatre, and Shakespeare in the case of Theatre in the Forest, accessible so we stay true to the text and get good calibre actors in who can speak the text well without amplification. But we add in some dancing, music and comedy in order to ease people into it.

"We also have a subsidised bus service from Ipswich and Woodbridge so that enables people to get out here where there isn't much public transport.

David Newborn

"We have a very strong ethos of working with excluded groups. I think there are a lot of barriers to theatre - rules of behaviour that you're supposed to observe and if you haven't been brought up with that it can be a bit of a turn-off."

A Hollesley Bay short film from 2008 called Touching Road was produced over five days and is available as an educational DVD. Twenty drug-users from Iceni played a live show called I Love Kitkats in 2009, which brings us to Red Rose Chain's major project...

Messages in a bottle

It's hoped that by Autumn 2010, Red Rose Chain will have its own purpose-built venue on Ipswich waterfront near Pizza Express. The Witchbottle is named after the old East Anglian custom of burying witch bottles in the walls of buildings to ward off evil spirits.

City Living Development owns the property and is spending Β£100,000 kitting-out the front-of-house area. Red Rose Chain has to find Β£500,000 to build the performance space which will have up to 200 removable seats.

It'll also be used for film screenings and has scope for live music.

David Newborn said they've got Β£75,000 from Ipswich Borough Council and the rest of the money looks like it'll be in place for the 2010 opening.

The aim is for The Witchbottle to provide a base for groups such as Iceni to work in and a separate theatre company is going to be formed made up of people dealing with drug addiction.

Leading Red Rose Chain actor Jimmy Grimes said the new home will help the core company establish its name nationally: "We're really ambitious with the work. We're building up the Theatre in the Forest event and we really want to build the audience, which we've already established, for the Witchbottle Theatre.

"We'd like to take plays touring and into London and internationally as well. In the long run, I'm really excited about fulfilling all the things I want to do creatively with the team that I work with and we've all got a vision of where we're headed.

"I think it's on the horizon, we want to be able to get out further so that we can go into London and draw attention to the work we do in Suffolk."

A Winter's Tale in the forest

For 2010 it's looking like there will be a revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Rendlesham Forest.

A review of A Winter's Tale will follow shortly in the Entertainment>Your Reviews section of this website. You'll be able to add your own review using the Have Your Say box at the bottom.