London has a rich and vibrant theatre scene, and this includes a number of amateur companies and venues.
This interview is the third in a series travelling around the capital to highlight what’s going on in non-professional theatre in the capital, and how these companies and venues work.
Sarah Chapman (fundraising & diversity) joins us today to talk about her role with Bromley Players and the company’s history and association with the Bob Hope Theatre, Eltham.
Can you tell us something about how Bromley Players started, and how it has evolved into what it is now?
Bromley Players started in 1967 as Bromley Operatic Society and performed G&S until 1976 at Holy Trinity Convent. In 1982 they moved to the Churchill Theatre with Fiddler on the Roof.
We remained performing there until 1998 when we moved to the Stage theatre for 4 years and then onto our home at the Bob Hope Theatre in 2004 where we remain performing now.
You are based at Bob Hope Theatre in Eltham. What’s that like as a venue to perform and develop shows in?
The venue is a 200 seater venue run by volunteers which hires out its facilities to local societies as well as putting on their own in house shows.
It has great facilities although there are some restrictions there, for example you cannot fly in set and we have to be careful when we hire set in from the bigger hire companies that the set is not too large for the stage etc.
This does however force us to be creative which is never a bad thing! The theatre size works well for us as a society as it means we can sometimes take risks in putting on more unusual shows such as Carrie or Urinetown due to the audience size not being too large to risk on shows such as this.
There is a good community feel to the theatre and whilst we are a hiring society we work closely with the theatre when booking our shows in and when we are looking at set and other factors.
What about your programming? What would a typical season look like and how do you choose which productions to stage?
We put on 2 large scale musicals each year, recent productions have included Grease, Carrie, 9 to 5, The Wedding Singer, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, and Rent.
We are about to embark on We Will Rock You and we have Eugenius lined up for October 2026. As you can probably tell from this list we tend to focus on more modern musicals and we are proud that we are often the first amateur theatre company to perform particular shows at the Bob Hope Theatre.
In choosing a production we look at a variety of factors – including if we can cast if from our membership, if we think it would sell, has the show been performed recently by other local groups, do we have the budget to do the show justice.
Does the Bob Hope Theatre have the technical requirements needed to do this show (for example we couldn’t do Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as you can’t fly at the theatre) and do we know of anyone from our current pool of people we use or are keen to nurture that may want to be on the production team for it. The show is decided by the committee.
What kinds of audiences are attracted to your shows? Do you aim for a particular demographic or type, and how do you go about reaching them?
I think we have a wonderfully varied audience who attend the shows – we have group bookings from a retirement group through to the Bob Hope Theatres youth group attending our productions and we see a lot of our patrons return time after time which we are very grateful for.
We are always looking to reach new audiences and for the last few years we have had a professional photoshoot for each show, run by RD Digital, to help us do this. This gives us a huge amount of social media content.
Each show has a very different look from the shoot and we try to involve as many of our members in the shoots as possible to enhance their experience with the society also.
We also try to put on a relaxed performance for each of our shows where possible as well as a BSL interpreted performance. This has brought a whole new audience to our shows and once that we are continually trying to grow.
Do you think the amateur theatre scene is in a good place now? What would improve it?
The amount of talent and the standard of shows that is performed in amateur theatre is incredibly high at the moment however a lot of amateur companies do struggle financially simply due to the overheads of putting on a show.
This doesn’t seem to be unique to am dram but is shared with many smaller theatre companies. In terms of improvement there has been some positive strides forward in terms of diversity however there is still more to be done and more diverse casts need to be seen on stage.
There has been recent productions where Christmas Eve in Avenue Q or Priit in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie have been played by white performers, this should be a thing of the past.
What are the main advantages and challenges of working in amateur theatre?
Amateur theatre can be a wonderful community, I met my husband and several of my closest friends through amateur theatre and the advantage is the strong friendships that it can build.
There is a society or group for everyone, from those who have trained professionally but not currently working in the theatre industry to those that have never set foot on stage before.
Challenge wise is the aforementioned financial constraints. Bromley Players aim to have high production values but this means that in order to break even we need to sell around 90%+ of tickets in order to simply break even.
This can mean that it s harder to take a gamble on a show that may be more unusual as there is a risk of loosing a significant amount of money on the show,
What has been Bromley Players’ proudest moment?
I think that members will probably answer this differently. For me personally it was putting on a relaxed performance for the first time for our production of Shrek.
This not only meant that we made our show more accessible to new audiences but other local societies saw that we did this and followed suit, helping to make amateur theatre more accessible in our local area.
Looking ahead, can you say something about the company’s plans?
Our next show after Rent is We Will Rock You with auditions taking place very soon. After this we are putting on Eugenius (performing in October 2026) – we haven’t heard of many/any other amateur companies performing this show and we can’t wait to get going on this as well.
We are also in the throws of revising our ED&I policies, they were updated following the Black Lives Matter movement but even in this short space of time society in general and Bromley Players has learnt a lot so we are updating our policies more generally.
We also are looking at them with a focus on gender diversity which was not considered previously in the policy and we want to make it clear that all are welcome at Bromley Players and have the correct framework in place to support this aim.