Profile

The Gallery Players was formed in 1985 by Pat Taplin to produce rarely performed plays and small musicals which only use a few actors or that larger theatre companies might find uneconomic.

Most of these productions (three or four per year) take place in a small, intimate theatre of less than 100 seats.

Once a year, we perform a musical at a larger venue, currently the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich.

Performing lesser known shows is always difficult when it comes to building an audience and balancing the books but by sticking to our guidelines and principles, we have grown an audience that trust us to produce interesting work. Audiences will come and see a Gallery show because they will always stimulate them with something a little different to the standard fare.

Actors are invited to take part in our shows rather than attend a formal audition process and because of our reputation for quality, we can always count on a very strong pool of performers.

The Gallery Players founder and guiding light Pat Taplin still directs and produces the majority of our shows but now encourages other directors to take the reins of their own ‘pet projects’, allowing them to cast freely and create individual shows with the backing of our excellent technical and production crew. The only insistence is that the final show should entertain and stimulate our discerning audience and should exude that level of quality that has brought us so many plaudits over the last twenty years.

We were the first group in the area to perform a Stephen Sondheim musical with ‘Company’ in 1987 and since then have produced nearly every one of his challenging repertoire.

The Gallery Players have won several awards including the NODA Eastern Area Shield for Best Production with ‘Carnival’ in 1999 and the Councillors Cup in 2000 and 2003 for ‘The Bakers Wife’ and ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’.