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Hannah Drake

News from the trenches

It's been a funny old year so far, here at Insane Root.

After an intense - but ultimately triumphant - production of 'Orpheus & Eurydice' in the Clifton Suspension Bridge Vaults (thank you to everyone who came!) Justin and I set about bringing our next project to fruition.

We'd been working on developing a large-scale Shakespeare, including site visits, venue hire negotiations, design conversations and even a read-through in advance of script editing, since September 2016......but sadly, by summer 2017 we reluctantly admitted defeat and decided that we just couldn't afford the venue. Yet.

We don't have any core funding as a company so we rely on being able to balance our budget through ticket sales (and sometimes sponsorship). And, as much as we love a challenge and do some crazy things in pursuit of theatre (our name is, after all 'insane'), we're not willing to risk thousands of pounds that we simply couldn't have made back based on the audience capacity and ticket prices we wanted to have. To give you an idea, we projected that the show would cost around £80k to make, and from tickets alone we would have had a shortfall of at least £10k. If we sold every ticket. (Btw, if you fancy helping us out with sponsorship, do drop us a line!)

So, back to the drawing board. Thankfully we have a few di