Sweet Thames: The London Folk Club Project

When

Sunday 22nd October 2023    
2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

The Con Club is very pleased to host Sweet Thames: The London Folk Club Heritage Project – A Verbatim Theatre performance with Ewan Wardrop.

Expect something folky, familiar, but altogether quite different. This is a free event thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Bar from 2:00pm. Show 2:45pm to 5:30pm

FREE event, all welcome, but you will need to book here: docs.google.com

This musical Verbatim Theatre performance is set in a London folk club in the early 1960s and draws on twenty-five oral history interviews recently collected for Sweet Thames: The London Folk Club Heritage Project.

It is written and performed by Ewan Wardrop; actor, dancer, multi-instrumentalist and musical comedian. Ewan began his career as a dancer for Matthew Bourne’s dance company, performing around the world, on Broadway and in the West End. As an actor he has appeared in productions for Shakespeare’s Globe, The RSC, The Old Vic, Kneehigh Theatre and Complicite amongst many others. In 2012 Ewan wrote and performed in a critically acclaimed one man show on the life of George Formby for the Edinburgh Festival. He is a member of The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and step dances and plays banjo ukulele with The Servants Ball. He also created the experimental Morris side, The Bo Diddlers.

Over six months, Ewan has immersed himself in the Sweet Thames interview recordings and transcriptions to create this one-man, one-hour show. It is scripted almost entirely word-for-word from the actual interviews and all twenty-five interviewees are represented in the performance. One extra interview, recorded on-line at a reminiscence event for the project is also included.

Find out more about the project here:

https://starcreativeheritage.org

Approx timings:

2:45pm Introduction to the project with exhibition viewing.

3:30pm Floor spots from the audience (as would take place in a folk club)

4:15pm Interval

4:30pm Ewan Wardrop’s Musical verbatim theatre performance

5:30pm End