Why Local Theatre Matters

On the value of live performance — and the rich theatrical tradition of North Devon

Great Torrington is fortunate to have a company that has been doing exactly that for over forty years. The Torrington Players are part of the cultural life of this town — part of its identity, its history, and its future. Every show staged, every workshop held, every new member welcomed is a small act of investment in the community that sustains us all. And in a region as theatrically alive as North Devon, that investment is part of something much larger than any single company or any single performance.

A theatre company is more than the sum of its productions. It is a gathering point — a place where people come together around a shared purpose, where friendships are made across generations and backgrounds, where the act of making something collectively builds the kind of social fabric that holds communities together.

For the Community

For many members of the Torrington Players, the company has been a constant thread through years of their lives — a source of friendship, purpose, and joy that has nothing to do with career or obligation. Some joined as young people and have performed for decades. Others came for the first time in later life and discovered something they had not known they were missing. Both stories are equally common and equally welcome.

The benefits of taking part in amateur theatre are well documented and genuinely transformative. Performing builds confidence — not just on stage but in everyday life. It develops the ability to listen, to be present, to work as part of a team. It stretches the imagination and offers a creative outlet that most working lives simply do not provide.

For the Performers

Local theatre carries an additional dimension: the people on stage are your neighbours, your friends, members of your community. That connection between performer and audience gives amateur theatre a warmth and authenticity that professional productions, for all their polish, sometimes lack. When you watch a Torrington Players production, you are watching people who love what they are doing, doing it for the love of it — and that shows.

There is something irreplaceable about being in a room with other people, watching other people tell a story in real time. No two performances are the same. The actors are present, the audience is present, and something passes between them that no recording can capture. Live theatre demands attention — and rewards it with an immediacy and emotional directness that screen-based storytelling rarely achieves.

For the Audience

More recently, the company has performed at Torrington Town Hall, taken productions out to village halls across North Devon, and explored formats — radio plays, murder mysteries, outdoor events — that reach audiences in different ways and places. Theatre, in North Devon, goes wherever the audience is.

For the Torrington Players, the Plough Arts Centre has been the dominant home — a venue that has grown and evolved alongside the company over more than four decades. From its origins as a Georgian coaching inn and later a Territorial Army drill hall, the Plough became one of the most distinctive and best-loved arts venues in Devon. The Players have been part of its story from almost the very beginning, and the relationship between company and venue has shaped the kind of theatre the Players make: intimate, ambitious, and alive to the possibilities of an unusual space.

The Plough — and Beyond

These societies — and many others like them — use whatever spaces are available: purpose-built venues, village halls, outdoor locations, community centres. The venue is rarely the point. What matters is the work, the people, and the audience.

Barnstaple Musical Comedy and Dramatic Society, founded in 1923, is one of the longest-established and most ambitious amateur companies in the South-West — staging large-scale musical productions that draw audiences from across the region. The Really Useless Theatre Company in Umberleigh has been entertaining rural North Devon with comedy and pantomime since 1987. Studio Theatre in Ilfracombe brings theatre to the coast. The Plough Youth Theatre in Torrington nurtures the next generation of performers from the age of four upwards, in Saturday workshops at the very venue that has been home to the Torrington Players for so much of their history.

North Devon's theatrical landscape is remarkably rich for a largely rural area. At the larger end, the Queen's Theatre in Barnstaple and the Landmark Theatre in Ilfracombe bring professional touring productions to the region — but the story of live theatre here has never depended on professional companies alone. It is the amateur and community societies that form the backbone of theatrical life in countless towns and villages across the area.

A Region That Makes Theatre

In an age of streaming, on-demand entertainment, and screens in every pocket, it would be easy to wonder whether live theatre still has a place — especially in a small market town in North Devon. The answer, emphatically, is yes. And North Devon knows it. This is a part of the country with a genuinely deep-rooted love of live performance — from the largest venues to the smallest village halls, from professional touring companies to amateur societies that have been making theatre for generations.