Pitlochry Festival Theatre has been shortlisted for Theatre of the Year at the prestigious The Stage Awards 2022.
The Stage Awards celebrate the best achievements in UK theatre in the past 12 months.
Pitlochry Festival Theatre is the only Scottish theatre in the category. It is nominated alongside London’s Donmar Warehouse and Battersea Arts Centre; Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury; Lyric Theatre, Belfast; and Royal and Derngate, Northampton.
Over the last year, the Perthshire venue has worked tirelessly to serve its audiences through its programming and community projects.
Curtains closed but the show went on
Pitlochry Festival Theatre has had a vision to be “inside, outside and online,” and that included a digital project, #LightHopeJoy, which delivered different creative works for 437 consecutive days.
While the venue was dark, it conceived a new digital audio platform Sound Stage in November 2020, commissioning and developing 10 new dramas, heard by 12,000 people.
And for its 70th-anniversary summer season this year, it created an entirely outdoor, socially distanced programme.
This included constructing an amphitheatre, bandstand, and riverboat to put on work, and redeveloping the garden for promenade performances. The season comprised 17 different productions and 171 performances, with 15,00 audience members attending live work.
Theatre with heart in community
As well as the productions, the theatre continued its community work. This included maintaining projects such as its Telephone Club, which helped isolated people from the area speak to somebody during the lockdowns.
On hearing the news, artistic director Elizabeth Newman said:
“We are absolutely thrilled to be nominated for The Stage’s Theatre of the Year Award.
“The entire Pitlochry Festival Theatre team have worked so hard over the last twelve months to make incredible things happen for our communities in these challenging times. We are so grateful to all the artists who have worked tirelessly to help us make amazing things happen.
“We are very proud to be a Scottish theatre and share Pitlochry with the World and the World with Pitlochry.”
The winners of the Stage Awards 2022 will be announced on January 31 at a ceremony at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London.