Breaking from the long tradition of Sam Cree plays for at least one year, this summer we will be performing BARGAIN BASEMENT, a hilarious comedy by Ernie Bennington. Ernie was a principal actor, writer and director within Dunmurry Dramatic Society which sadly is no longer in existence. For more than thirty five years, Ernie’s sons Paul and Ian have been active members of Lambeg Players and in recent years, Ian’s daughter Karen has been heavily involved in our pantomimes and plays in acting on stage, directing and choreographing the productions and most recently writing the pantomime. For this, her grandad’s play, she has been rewriting some aspects, particularly to switch some parts from male to female to suit the current cohort of actors wanting to be in it.
In January 2024, Lambeg Players entered a new era with a Pantomime that was penned, not by regular author Ian Bennington but by his daughter Karen. This was Karen’s first foray into writing a pantomime and it went down extremely well with our regular audience. A lot of people both within the drama club and those attending the show remarked on how obvious it was that a young person had written it and how they had enjoyed the modern theme and style of writing which was very different to what they had been used to. But reactions were universally positive with so many people saying how talented the young people were and what great singers and dancers they were. Continuing our tradition for charitable contributions as a community theatre group, our famous orange buckets yielded £1300 which was split equally between our two chosen charities CARING BREAKS and LISBURN DOWNTOWN CENTRE.
Another sell out run after a long break due to Covid. We had wonderful feedback from so many people and it was remarked upon how good it was to see so many new faces and talented young singers and dancers. We had a great time putting on the show and our legendary ORANGE BUCKET collections on the Friday and Saturday night shows yielded an amazing £1,300 which was divided between CARING BREAKS and LISBURN FOOD BANK.
