Hello and welcome to the first weekly newsletter all about Minotaur Theatre Company’s ‘The Librarians’. If you’re one of our sponsors, thank you so much for your support through this project. We’d like to take this opportunity to give you a little feedback on how the show is progressing, as well as how your money is being spent.

WEEK 1  |  WEEK 2 >

“I’ve been having nightmares,” whispered Mandrake Hardbach.

Now that rehearsals have started, director Lewis Garvey has revealed his plans for plot and character. The cast are all really excited to be working on this project. I won’t go into much detail, but murder is afoot in the Library. If you want to learn more about the different characters, follow us on twitter @MinotaurFringe to see some of the very first images of the cast exploring their characters. More character names are released every day of rehearsals so watch the twitter for more details!

Talking about characters, the director asked the cast to watch a film called: “Belleville Rendez-vous” by Sylvain Chomet. In this French film, Chomet uses a unique visual characterisation to make each and every character in the film stylistically different in terms of voice, movement and personality. It is something that we’re developing into The Librarians. In light of this, the cast were asked to embody different shapes, punctuation and letters. To see how they got on, see: https://vine.co/v/hWeFaPKPYA1

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is how much the cast are involved in the workings of the show. Not only are they improvising and developing most of the scenes under Lewis’ guidance, they’re all lending a hand in building set, props and of course, puppets.

If you haven’t already seen, there is a new addition to the website. This new Puppet page will soon contain all the images of the puppets as they progress from scrunched up newspaper, mod-rock and sticks into The Grim Librarian and a hideous Monster made of books.

The set is also taking shape, and any major work should be completed in the next few days. Once the painting is complete, we will have painted around 300 fake books on our set. It’s one of the things your money has helped us build, and I think you will agree, it’s certainly looking good!

Next week, we’ll be able to show you some more rehearsal images, show you how the puppets are progressing and maybe even a few videos of the cast. See you next week!