Practice Set 5 • Test 2 – Reading & Writing

The Larkfield Playhouse occupies a tall brick building beside the canal in Marsden Bridge. For most of its life the building was a grain store, and sacks of barley were once lifted straight off the boats through the doors that are now the main entrance. A group of local people bought it in 1998 and spent three years turning it into a theatre with 180 seats.

Almost everybody connected with the Playhouse gives their time for nothing, from the actors and the people who sew the costumes to the volunteers who sell programmes on the door. There is one exception: the technical manager, who looks after the lighting and sound, is paid a small salary, because the equipment is complicated and someone has to be responsible for it.

The theatre stages four productions between September and June, usually two plays, a musical and something for younger audiences during the winter holidays. Rehearsals take place three evenings a week for about two months before each show opens, and every production runs for six nights.

Adults pay £10 a ticket and school pupils pay £6, which makes ten pounds the most anyone is charged. On the opening night of every production, anyone under 25 pays only half the usual price. Tickets can be booked on the website at any hour or by ringing the number on our leaflets, but the box office window itself is only staffed in person on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

Auditions are announced on the website and are open to anyone aged 14 or over. You do not need to have stood on a stage before, and you certainly do not need to live in the town – several of our regular performers travel in from villages twenty miles away. Anyone who prefers to stay out of the spotlight is just as welcome to help with scenery, lighting or costumes.

The little bar in the foyer opens one hour before every performance and serves coffee, tea and homemade cake. During the daytime the building is often hired by local clubs and businesses for meetings and classes. Unfortunately we have no car park, but parking on Canal Street is free after six o’clock in the evening.

Whenever I mention my podcast at school, somebody says the same thing: “I could never do that, I haven’t got the equipment.” Neither had I. I record everything on an old phone with a £15 microphone clipped to it, and the software I use to put the episodes together cost me nothing at all. That is really why I agreed to write this: I want other people my age to stop waiting until they own the perfect kit, because the kit is not the point.

What nobody warns you about is the editing. Recording a conversation takes forty minutes; turning those forty minutes into fifteen takes me most of a weekend. I have to cut the long pauses, the traffic outside, the moment my guest’s kettle boils. For a while I found this so frustrating that I nearly gave up, and I still think it is by far the hardest part of the whole process.

The interviews themselves are another matter entirely. I honestly thought a town this size would run out of stories after three or four episodes. Instead I have discovered a woman who sailed across the Atlantic alone at nineteen, a retired baker who fed the whole street during a flood, and a man who has photographed the same tree every week for thirty years. I have learned more about this place in eighteen months of asking questions than in all my years of living here.

A new episode appears every fortnight, always recorded on a Sunday afternoon at my guest’s kitchen table, because people talk far more easily in their own homes than in a studio. Roughly four hundred people listen, which sounds tiny until you stand in our market square and imagine four hundred faces looking back at you.

If you are thinking of starting something similar, my advice is simple. Begin with somebody you already know – a neighbour, an aunt, your old primary school teacher – because your first interview will be awkward and it helps if the other person forgives you. And please do not check your listener numbers every day. Make the episode you would want to listen to, and let the audience find you slowly.