Heart Productions - Theatre with a beat

The Plays

Time after Time

In night time dream, imagined fancies do freely fly

Written by Frank Bramwell

This was our debut performance, and because of the nature of the play, we wanted to stage it in a most special performing space. As luck would have it, we found such a venue – a beautiful, atmospheric church newly converted to an Arts Centre!

“The play is certainly demanding in its multiplicity of characters & setting . . . . and there was a strong sense of real enjoyment of the production from all involved.”

And so St.John’s Church, Ladywood, Birmingham became our Theatre home for 8 performances in March 2003. A cast of 14 actors, all but one from the Birmingham area, set about to bring the play to life. The ‘non-Brummie’ was John Huston, who came across from Canada to play the role of Shakespeare himself!

“Overall it was a really enjoyable performance and certainly deserves to be seen by a bigger audience”

So what is Time after Time all about?

“Time After Time” is based upon the idea that one night, the very night before he leaves Stratford to go to live in London, or perhaps the night before he dies, William Shakespeare has a dream. In this dream he encounters many “familiars” – these are people, “characters”, from plays and stories he has not written yet – or else wrote some years before – or from some of the stories which “characters” from his plays will inspire other people to write – or they are characters from plays by William Shakespeare who escape from his imagined universe and sojourn briefly in other people’s imaginary worlds. In this dream world shapes dissolve and restructure themselves as freely as people do and as freely as sound does – nothing is quite what it seems and everything is more than it is.

"A clever play brought to life by an enthusiastic and very capable cast"

Despite some teething problems with the new venue, audience and Reviewer reaction was extremely positive, as the British Theatre Guide Reviewer put it:

“A new play by a first-time author performed by a fledgling company in a ground-breaking venue sounds like a recipe for disaster. But not when you put as much organisation and enthusiasm into the venture as Stafford-based Heart Productions - motto: "theatre with a beat! It would all have been an anti-climax if Time After Time had not been as fresh and original as its surroundings.

The real pity was that more people didn't make the effort to see it. Overall Time After Time is a superb, delightful production which is by no means much ado about nothing and should certainly be as you like it. "