Prospecting by Bill Nash

Presence Theatre's new Reading Group met for the third time on April 24th 2015 to continue exploring lesser-known plays. Here actor Bill Nash responds to the process of digging through unfamiliar territory.

"In among the unknown and unseen ... there is gold."

There’s a reason a lot of plays never get performed. They’re terrible. But at the same time, in among the unknown and unseen, the seldom-heard-of and the too-weird, there is gold. The Presence Theatre Reading Group aims to find this, and at the last meeting on the 24th April it was good to be among a large group of actors trying to breathe life into written work that looked less than promising. Diligence, talent and rigour are no guarantee of success, however, and a few of the pieces clunked, but frequently when we got the rhythm right, we got the goods. Fredrik Brattberg’s The Returning was a real revelation, and the other pieces all held moments of promise. There’s gold in them there hills.