Sheep Town Theatre Company.

Sheep Town Theatre Company.
Sheep Town aims to offer new and relevant theatre taking their work in, and making it relevant to the community. To achieve this, Sheep Town works alongside the community to bring to the stage their stories and issues.
Sheep Town, Skipton’s professional theatre company, is delighted to announce their 2007 season at their new home, The Mart Theatre, Skipton. Alongside the productions Sheep Town’s classically trained professional actors will also be running workshops in acting for both adults and children.

Friday 12th and Saturday 13th January 2007:
The Diversification of Veg Boy
With the government expecting farmers
to produce miracles, one does….
The Diversification of Veg Boy is written by Thomas Aldersley and is a modern fairytale about an unlikely Superhero and the exploitation for financial gain of his power. The story is inspired by and is an allegory for the plight of farmers in the UK. The last decade has been hard for farmers in the UK with subsidy cuts, Foot and Mouth and Mad Cow disease having a big impact on their businesses. Also Farmers in the UK are being increasingly exploited by large supermarket firms, with the cost of the produce in the supermarket going down and the cost to grow the produce going up, an unsustainable relationship. This coupled with Government pressure to diversify, in other words; do something other than just farming, has lead to hundreds of farms closing forever.
The Superpower concept, although unlikely, is an analogy for the ridiculous concept of diversification. Farmers are being expected to produce miracles and turn a struggling industry in to a successful one with a few Government buzz words and flashy initiatives. Some farmers are struggling to diversify their businesses, not through lack of effort but because of lack of experience running a diverse business and lack of possibilities. The results being that in an attempt to diversify farmers invariably can go bankrupt.

The play is a black comedy which explores these issues, with its target audience being non regular theatre goers between the ages of 15 and 115. The play can be taken at face value, as a black comedy about a rural Yorkshire Superhero and serve purely as entertainment. Or, as we believe, the play can serve as an important piece of social commentary that highlights the plight of a minority community in this country, one whose story is rarely heard.

A modern fairytale inspired by the plight of farmers in the Craven in the wake of the Foot and Mouth crisis.

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