Volunteer Medway at the Medway Little Theatre

Zahra Barri gets stuck in at Medway's community theatre, and gets involved with more community events in one very busy week

Medway Little Theatre is far from little. It’s big in both philosophy and physique. When the director of the Nobel prizewinning Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist (which was on last month and wonderfully reviewed by Local Authority), Chris Parnell, shows me around, I marvel at its many nooks and crannies. From the outside, nestled between the Nag’s Head pub and Rochester Independent College, it looks hardly big enough to swing a cat on a hot tin roof (sorry), but remarkably, this Dickensian building houses a 100-seat auditorium!

Medway Little Theatre.

It is also equipped with a fully working and licenced bar, large dressing room with the iconic diva spotlights around the mirrors, a comically staged (centre) trap door for flamboyantly theatrical entrances and exits, a spacious attic that both Cash in the Attic and Sort Your Life Out’s Stacey Solomon would have a field day in, positively hoarded with costumes, props and various theatrical accruements and knick-knacks culminated over the years, a winding corridor decorated with past production pics dating back umpteen prime ministers ago, kitchen facilities, cast and crew toilets which you can’t flush while show is on (!), separate audience toilets, and a rehearsal room! Not to sound too much like an estate agent, but to say this place is deceptively spacious is not an exaggeration!

“Hardly little at all!” I say as Chris points at himself twenty years ago in an old photo in the corridor. He’s in what looks like an Alan Ayckbourn play, donning a Tom Selleck moustache. Further down the corridor, we see that the theatre has staged both the great comedies and the great tragedies and everything in between, from Alan Bennet to Willy Russell to Checkhov to Shakespeare. And now the satirical, critically acclaimed Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist. Eager to show off my acting chops, I tell Chris proudly I played Alan Steadman’s character in Abigail’s Party and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? during my university acting degree at Bretton Hall. It might not have been RADA as I had planned, but it does brag an alumnus of Kay Mellor and The League of Gentlemen, perhaps one of the reasons my acting passions metamorphosised into writing and comedy passions. I also tell him I was cast as the Maniac in Fo’s Accidental Death at college, and Chris is keen for me to meet his own Maniac, the talented Mike Dickenson, to compare experience of this iconic role.