Crazy about Golf Course Turning up for Photoshoot!

When Newport Playgoers needed to take photos on a crazy golf course for a new play they are staging they were amazed to find one turn up, as if by magic, on their doorstep.

LEFT:  Crazy golf course creator Dave Lovatt (centre) with Playgoers Bruno Cook and Lauren Brown.

“It was unbelievably good luck,” said the play’s director, Caroline Drewett-Mansell. “A brilliant crazy golf course was built on the riverbank for the Big Splash weekend. It was the perfect setting for the photoshoot to promote the new play ‘Bunkered’ which is part of The Hole in One Act Play Festival we are staging in October. We spoke to the owner of the course and discovered he also works in the theatre in Bristol. He was very helpful and let us use his course for our photos.”

“I was only too pleased to be of assistance,” said the course’s creator and owner Dave Lovatt. “This is the first time we’ve used our new crazy golf course and we’ve been amazed at how friendly, fun-loving and welcoming the people of Newport are. When I’m not building crazy golf courses I’m working in the theatre – and my production of ‘Carny Village’ is at the Riverfront on Saturday 4th September,” he added.

The crazy golf course is the setting for ‘Bunkered’ by Phil Mansell, one of four new one-act plays which will be premiered at the Dolman Theatre in October. The plays were the winners of a golf-themed play-writing competition organised by Playgoers and judged to be the best by Wales’s top playwright Frank Vickery.

The other new plays, which to tie in with the Ryder Cup coming to Newport, all take an innovative and unusual look at golf, are 'Out of Bounds' by Neil Chapman, a Pinter-esque look at the absurdities of life, ‘Surviving the Century’, by Kevin Myers, which focuses on the planning of a golf club’s centenary celebrations, and ‘Futagolf’, by Mark Hardwidge and David D. Thomas, about a couch potato who is given a free session on a virtual reality golf course.

The Hole In One Act Play Festival is at the Dolman Theatre from 12 – 16 October. For more information and to book tickets, phone (01633) 263670. More information is available online at http://www.dolman-theatre.co.uk/ and http://www.newportplaygoers.wordpress.com/