Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

STILL RAGGED! a new touring community folk musical being created & starting the tour at Newhampton Arts Centre Wolverhampton…

….from May 2023 and will start it’s tour from Wolverhampton in October 2023, that will involve fifty+ community artists and participants with Townsend Theatre Productions.This project is a new way of creating and touring mass-appeal, issue-based theatre that puts community at the heart of the activity to create important and meaningful engagement for participants and audiences alike.

This project is a way of tackling issues of inequality, work-place exploitation, whilst promoting unity and trade unionism, in a purposeful and creative way.

This project is designed to be large-scale and high impact to raise the awareness of the issues that are the focus of the project across the mass and social media platforms; to galvanise and promote community activity, and inspire, share skills, educate, and move.

There are three phases to the project:

The first, is to partner with Newhampton Arts Centre Wolverhampton (A priority place for Arts Council England)to create a folk opera and engage as many community groups as possible (trade union, history, drama, youth theatre, refugee, choir, schools, colleges, dance, music-hubs, disabled & neuro-diverse groups).

Phase two is a workshop period of six months skill development lead by professionals (voice, acting/movement, dance, music, political speaking) and story-sharing (creative writing) to lay the basis of the final show before intensive rehearsal and final performances.

Phase three, is to take the folk opera performance ‘model’ created with the first venue and strategically tour it across the UK in 2024 & 25; for example, rehearse intensively with another community in their local venue for a month, after the eight-month workshop period as before, and perform the show for five days, and so on.

contact to show interest via http://www.townsendproductions.org.uk/Townsends productions 

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Radio 4 production of Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in three one-hour parts can be listened to
Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY18Yhy2eEg
Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHwZDWo3e9M
Part 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSqBk3UAThU
cast includes Johnny Vegas, Timothy Spall, Bill Bailey and then an MP, John Prescott.

Read RTP, the whole book free at https://www.freeclassicebooks.com/Robert%20Tressell/The%20Ragged%20Trousered%20Philanthropists.pdf

Free 8-hour audiobook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfD61oLZM94

The book is available to buy here. Voted one of the nation’s 100 best-loved books in the BBC’s recent ‘Big Read’ event, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an influential classic of working class literature. Written in the early years of the last century but not published in full until 1955, it has now been translated into six languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.

Christine Coates, Librarian of the TUC Collections, said: ‘This is a book which changes lives and has had a profound effect on tens of thousands of workers since it was first published in 1914. I never fail to be surprised at the power of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the story of a group of painters in a small town on the south coast of England at the beginning of the 20th century, to evoke immediate sympathy and support from readers around the world.’

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