The Mount Players

The Mount Players is an Australian amateur theatre company, from Macedon in Victoria, Australia..
Company history
The Mount Players began in 1972, when group of interested people met to stage one-act plays. It continued, mostly playing at the various One-Act Play Festivals around the state. In 1975 the group was granted occupancy of the old Presbyterian Church in Macedon, adjacent to Jubilee Hall. With development work carried out by members of the group, the church was converted between 1975 and 1977 into a small theatre seating 50 persons. The original Mount View Theatre opened in 1977.
The company was established in 1972 by a people in the Macedon district who wanted to form a group capable of entering a play in that year’s One-act Play festival at Kyneton. The idea originated with Macedon resident Neville Thurgood, and he was supported by others including Fred Blake, David Reeves, Pat Royal and Pauline Garner. The company they formed was called The Mount Players. The group continued as a theatre company after the 1972 festival, but most of the productions in immediately subsequent years were one-act plays performed at festivals, because the Mount Players had no permanent theatre. During these years they also started performing full-length melodramas that had been written by Neville Thurgood including “The Furtive Fortunes Of Fickle Fate” and “Further Furtive Fortunes Of Fickle Fate”. These productions were staged in a range of venues.
In 1977 the original theatre was opened with the performance of “The Golden Legion Of Cleaning Women”.
Between 1978 and 1982, now with a permanent ‘home’ at Macedon, the company undertook a wider range of performances. These included murder mysteries, comedies, musicals and pantomimes.
One-act play performances were continued and entered into festivals throughout the State.
A group of members called the Daytime Players also produced shows such as Alladin and Time and Space, written by Janet Slattery of Mount Macedon. Also during this period external groups presented shows at the theatre, in particular the Adelphi Players, a Melbourne based group who had no fixed theatre. Their performances included “Equus”, “Hamp” and “The Knack”. Other groups that performed at the original theatre were the boys from Malmsbury Youth Training Centre, the Boy Scouts with the Gang Show, and ACTS, a Christian Theatre group.
During the Ash Wednesday fires of February 1983 the original theatre, was destroyed, along with the homes of many of the members. Destroyed also were many of the original memoirs, photographs and programs.
Following the fires, members’ initial efforts were put into assisting those who had lost their homes. Planning for the replacement of the Theatre was postponed until 1984 as rebuilding the theatre was justifiably considered a lower priority within the community, and so the company started another period of being ‘homeless’ and performing wherever appropriate to the type of production.
In 1986, following a period of intensive fund raising, work was started on the replacement of the Mountview Theatre. A professional builder coordinated the rebuilding working part time, and members assisted whenever possible in the more mundane work of digging holes, helping with concrete pours, assembling and erecting the framework, stacking and laying bricks, fixing weather boards and many other tasks. The building slowly took shape over some four years of hard work, and the high quality of the work is obvious in the result - a wonderful small theatre with the facility to host a wide variety of theatrical productions.
The energy of the company was greatly affected in 1987 by the deaths of the then President Margaret Woods and former Secretary and Life Member Fred Blake, and it took a while for many to regain enthusiasm for performance and rebuilding. However 1988 & 1989 saw an enormous amount of effort put into completing the theatre, with most of the required manual labour and all the internal painting being carried out by company members.
As construction work proceeded it became clear that the cost of the new building exceeded the funds held by the company and in 1990 an agreement was entered into with the Shire of Gisborne whereby the Shire owned the property and assisted with the construction, while the Mount Players enjoyed exclusive occupancy of the theatre building and continued to maintain the building and manage its uses.
The money the company raised for the rebuilding was a combination of insurance, compensation and donations - donations in particular from the Shire of Gisborne and many amateur and some professional theatre groups all over Australia who freely gave takings from performances.
In 1990 the ‘new’ Mountview Theatre was opened with the production “Scrooge”.
The period from 1991 has seen enormous growth and vigour in the company and in the breadth of shows performed - now four annual major productions, plus a One-act Play Festival held at the theatre, plus several one-act plays entered in the State competition.
The company has continued to produce musicals, dramas and comedies with an increasing emphasis on Australian shows.
Locally written productions have also been performed:
· One-act Plays - Eve Old
· Rumble Rock - xxxx
· Musical Hall Tribute to Gilbert and Sullivan - Dialogue, Pete Walsh
Performers on stage have ranged from about age 4 to those who are well over 70 and the Mount Players Committee has provided strong leadership and coordination. Family involvement in the Company has always been an important factor and it has been wonderful to see children grow into teenagers and beyond while maintaining interest and commitment. The company is fortunate to have seen some former players (including Andrew Mill, Justine Schnellbeck and Madeline West) moving into professional acting.
The Youth Theatre
in 2007, the Mount Players began a youth theatre program, accpeting children into the theatre in age groups to co-ordinate and stage their own plays, for the benefit of their parents, and indeed the theatre community. Due to the increasing number of teenager members of the Mount Players Youth Theatre attaining roles in their mainstream, adult productions, the Mount Players created a new, advanced Youth Theatre group, who are currently writing their own One-Act play, the working title for which is "The Asylum of Oz". This play will be performed at the theatre and other Victorian theatres as part of the One-Act Play Festival

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