Beyond the Bus Stop

Sorry I’ve been a little AWOL over the past few days. But with two previews under our belt and a full audience last night, I feel I can finally loosen the buckle and take some time to dish out some juicy morsels about our mysterious theatrical adventure. And I’ve finally been given the go-ahead by Will Wrightson (our other producer who we’ve nicknamed “Dad” due to his aptitude at minibus driving and his “firm but calm” manner) to reveal a couple of details about our secret show. But in the true Threshold style I’m giving you the first one in the form of a riddle thanks to one of our three writers, Fred Gordon:

The start of my name’s pitched between so and ti,

My third and my fourth are a farewell, no “e”.

My fifth is a letter that likes to be rolled,

My sixth and my seventh are across the threshold

The end of my name is an “s” if it’s lisped,

The monster’s within me, so please answer this!

So if you’ve solved that amazing conundrum (see what I did there?), you’ll know we have quite a set-piece at the heart of our show – are you brave enough to enter? And due to how hush-hush we’ve had to keep details about the production, our audiences thus far have certainly been very bold. I thought if you took the fringe-mongers out the fringe it would be like a fish out of water. How wrong I was. If anything whisking the flyer-ridden festival-goers away from the city and giving them a glimpse of some real-life countryside, has engendered them with super-human agency. If your idea of audience participation is panto, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

And opening night was more than a little terrifying having been used to imagined audiences for almost two months now, so awaiting for the actual living organisms coming to our “clandestination” was almost sick-inducing. It was the sort of feeling you get when you decide to have an impromptu house party at your family home – there’s that moment before people start to turn up when you think that maybe it wasn’t such an inspired idea after all: the carnage that’ll ensue is almost certain and certainly out of your hands. However, as the audience invaded, I went past the point of Threshold and realised that they were what had been missing all along.

Here’s hoping you get lost in our riddle and find yourself on a bus out of the city.

Yours puzzlingly,

Tom