🕯 Book now for Lights Out and get 10% off
All right, luvvies? So, it turns out producing a stage show is a lot of work, and in the initial stages that work is mainly marketing. So far, I've put more work into the poster for the show than into the show itself. But the balance is shifting! Onward!
Coming right up
Merely Roleplayers and Blackshaw present Lights Out
Merely Roleplayers presents Vigil: Bad Dog
International Podcast Month presents Dust Wardens
I present some badges
Tickets are now on sale
for Lights Out, the first stage show from the Merely Roleplayers team.
Date: Sunday 24 October, 8:30pm
Venue: Pleasance Theatre, North Road, London N7 9EF
Special offers
Enter the code EARLYBIRD at the checkout for a discount - this is valid until 24 September. And booking early isn't just cheaper; it also shows the venue that they were right to risk giving us a slot, and it reassures me that we were right to apply for one!
The Scare Slam, Blackshaw Theatre Company's annual scary spoken word showcase, is in the same venue at 6:30pm the same day. If you book both shows at once, the site will automatically give you a discount.
There's a nice pub at the theatre that does good pizza (or did last time I was there, pre-pandemic). See both shows, have a pizza and a pint in between. Sounds like a nice evening out to me.
The show
As a reminder, Lights Out is a Merely Roleplayers show, but not a live podcast recording. We'll be spinning you a tragic tale in our usual dramatic improvisational style, every so often placing ourselves in the hands of fate, represented by flickering candles and fickle tarot cards.
Since the last issue of this newsletter, I've been hard at work creating things like this:
And writing things like this:
No one knows what happened to the Blackout Four - only that none of them survived that final dark night. Merely Roleplayers hope to reconstruct the events of that night, live on stage.
Part seance, part campfire tale, part roleplaying game, Lights Out is a fight against fate to seize a glimmer of hope - before the dark draws in.
Details around what precisely is supposed to have happened to the Blackout Four are deliberately vague, because we haven't developed the show enough to know yet! The longlist is long and full of dark, isolated places where something awful and tragic could feasibly happen and remain mysterious. Examples include but are not limited to a lighthouse, an abattoir, and Crossness Pumping Station.
And here's a sneak preview of the cast list. These should all be familiar names to followers of Merely Roleplayers:
The Blackout Four: Alexander Pankhurst, Helen Stratton, Richard Stratton, Natalie Winter
The Darkness: Matt Boothman
Up to now, most of the time I've spent on Lights Out has been on creating posters and images for websites, writing press releases, doing risk assessments, ordering props, and lining up interviews to promote the show. But from next weekend, we're starting rehearsals, and we get to start feeling out the shape the show itself will take. How the cards and candles will guide the story. How the cast will lift and support each other. What kind of energy we're going to be radiating out to our audience. I can't wait.
Expect some behind-the-scenes rehearsal photos next time! But in the meantime, you know what to do:
Vigil: Bad Dog
opens in the Merely Roleplayers Main House on Tuesday 21 September. We're returning to Sherrydown, with Alexander Pankhurst reprising his role as Graham the demon accountant, Ellie Pitkin as Persephone Byron the Victorian time traveller, Natalie Winter as Gwynned the thrice-cursed shieldmaiden of the Morrigan, and Josh Yard as Jinny Greenteeth the oft-reincarnated witch and sort-of con artist.
Sherrydown's undergoing some reconstruction work after Market Street got wrecked up in Vigil: Tourist Trap, and the company responsible has some slightly ... overzealous security, shall we say. All four player characters are in some sense very old, or at least out of place in the modern world, so I knew I had to tangle them up in corporate bad behaviour and council corruption and all sorts of other things you can't thwack with a flaming staff.
The response to The First Nova, which just wrapped up in the Studio, has been lovely. Josh's verbose local politician character seems to have resonated particularly...
i already knew i was in love with @JoshYard’s diplomat from the first ep but then i heard “i changed ‘choose two beliefs’ to ‘choose two campaign slogans’” and i lost my mind
— riley rethal (@rileyrethaI) August 17, 2021
...though we can all, always, afford to #BeMoreJodie.
Follow the Merely Roleplayers podcast
International Podcast Month
is now upon us! There's lots of good stuff up on the feed already - I especially recommend The Quarantine Zone, an Annihilation-inspired actual play of Trophy Dark, run by Christine Prevas, who played my squadmate Antiquity Hardt in last year's Beam Saber episode.
The episode I'm in this year is slated for this coming Tuesday, 14 September, so follow the podcast to get that when it drops. It contains, in no particular order: cute children, haunted excavation equipment, and what if hayfever but make it horror. Not to be missed.
Follow International Podcast Month
Pins to get under your skin
Left: a round button badge with the words "if at first you don't succeed, run." over a black and white photo of a man, from a softer world. I suspect this will be a good survival tactic for the characters in Lights Out.
Right: an enamel pin of a spacesuit head and shoulders, with lightning reflected in the visor, from The Magnus Archives. Exactly what this pin represents could be considered a spoiler for The Magnus Archives, so I'll just say it's kind of my horror Hogwarts House. And we're in the run-up to Hallowe'en, and I'm about to start rehearsals for a tragic horror show, and it feels an appropriate season to wear my fears on my sleeve, or lapel.
One more of these newsletters before the show. See you in the next one, then see you there.
Cheers,
Matt x