DORSETBORN: FORT - Lighthouse Poole, Thursday 21 November

Saturday, October 5, 2024
Dorsetborn presents FORT by Tabitha Hayward
 
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER 8pm (SHERLING STUDIO) 
Free post-show Q&A
Age guidance: 13+
 
Tickets and information 01202 280000 
 
Fort, Tabitha Hayward’s evocative and compelling new play, set on a Dorset hillfort, plays Lighthouse Poole on Thursday 21 November as part of a regional tour ahead of its London premiere.
 
It’s 1am on an Iron Age hillfort in North Dorset where 15-year-old best friends Viv and Daisy are waiting for a ghost. Away from dysfunctional families and small-town gossip, up on Fort, Viv and Daisy can be entirely themselves. With so much beyond their control, Fort is their stomping ground. Their escape. Until the ghost turns up.
 
Playwright Tabitha Hayward, who tutored the Young Writers course at Lighthouse before handing over the reins to Fort director Rohan Gotobed, started writing Fort on train journeys between Dorset and the Royal Court Theatre in London, where she was the only non-Londoner on a playwriting course.
 
“Everyone says ‘write what you know’, and I’d always thought that was way too boring for me,” says Tabby, “until I realised no one else had grown up in a town with a cheese festival, or knew what a hillfort was, and that all the stuff which I’d found boring and frustrating as a kid was actually hilarious and brilliant and kind of moving.”
 
The result is a beautiful snapshot of rural adolescence, recently shortlisted for Masterclass’ Pitch Your Play prize.
 
Funded by Arts Council England, Fort is Dorsetborn’s latest production, following 2023’s Georgia and the Iceberg and Pride. Director Rohan Gotobed, who has spent much of this year working at Badbury Rings Hillfort, says: “This play deserves to be seen – to be heard – to be experienced. It’s a genuine South West success story; having been developed through Poole Lighthouse’s Sanctuary Programme, Taunton Brewhouse’s Summer School, and The Script’s the Thing Festival in Dorchester, Fort shows what can be achieved by local artists in collaboration with supportive organisations.
 
“We can’t wait for audiences to meet Viv and Daisy.”