Key Projects

Research into Western Players history

Ongoing research has revealed that the group was formed in april 1904 and has performed over 270 shows (identified to date!). Recently we found a photo of a poster dated 1858 which surprisingly, to us, seemd to suggest our group was around from as early as the 1850's. We are still researching. List of known productions is on our site, below:

Tracking down a copy of the script for our first show (1904)

Finally found a copy of "Checkmate" by A Halliday which we performed in April 1904. It's in a tatty state, but readable.

Further research into the Western Players history

From work kindly donated by Mark Childs, the following has been discovered..... Western Players This theatre group, highly active today, can apparently trace its line back to 1854, when the newly-formed Mechanics Institute Amateur Theatrical Club performed the one-act farce The Lady of Munster, written in 1830 by the songwriter and dramatist Thomas Haynes Bayly. This took place inside the Swindon railway workshops, most probably on a stage set up in part of the original Painters’ Shop. On the night that the Mechanics Institution building opened in High Street (Emlyn Square) New Swindon in 1855, the players, having settled on the Mechanics Institute Dramatic Club as their name, performed the farce Binks the Bagman by the Irish playwright Joseph Stirling Coyne, and a melodrama, The Rent Night. The venue was the large hall on the first floor of the Institution, where a permanent stage had been built for theatrical performances. The players tinkered with their name over the next few years; it was the Mechanics Institute Dramatic Society in 1861, and in 1898 it became the Great Western Railway Amateur Players. Until at least 1870, all of the group’s members were men. Female parts were taken by non-Society members co-opted from elsewhere, and, from the very first productions, professional actresses were sometimes engaged for important roles. Another change of name in the early 1900s saw the group emerge as The Great Western Railway (Swindon) Mechanics Institution Amateur Theatrical Society, under which name, in 1904, they staged their first production, Checkmate − a farce by Scottish journalist and dramatist Andrew Halliday. Since then, the Society has staged between two and four productions each year. In 1933 it became the GWR (Swindon) Amateur Theatrical Society; it first performed as the Great Western Players in 1936, and took the name Western Players in 1949. The players have had a succession of ‘homes’, namely the Swindon railway workshops, the Mechanics Institution, the Little Theatre in Bridge Street, and the Arts Centre in Devizes Road. From A Companion to the History of Swindon Copyright © Mark Child 2012