Year-long Barrow drama festival ends with celebration of the town
A year-long drama festival celebrating Barrow’s people and stories will conclude with a new production bringing local experiences to the stage.
Theatre Factory will present 67,000 Barrovians Can’t Be Wrong at Cooke’s Studios on Abbey Road, bringing the IF! Inclusion Festival to a close after a programme running since autumn last year. The production will be staged across two performances, with the final show forming the culmination of a year of theatre, community participation and storytelling. Organisers describe the work as a celebration of the town and the people who have helped shape its identity, with real events and familiar places providing the inspiration for the stories.
The new play is made up of 15 short stories, each presented as a five-minute fable based on real people, events and locations connected with Barrow. The stories cover a broad range of subjects, including Dave Day, footballer Georgia Stanway, The Bon Bon and Barrow AFC’s appearance at Wembley. By bringing such different elements of local life together, the production aims to create a theatrical portrait of the town through a series of short and distinctive stories.
Theatre Factory artistic director Rachel Ashton said the production is the final show in the festival and described the wider programme as a love song to Barrow. She explained that the title was taken from an old Elvis Presley album, while the content itself is rooted in genuine local experiences. Some of the stories are told by people, while others are narrated from the unusual perspective of seagulls, reflecting the production’s playful approach to looking at everyday life in the town.
The choice of seagulls as commentators is part of the production’s distinctive style, giving the stories an alternative viewpoint while keeping the focus firmly on Barrow. Ashton said the birds were considered ideally placed to observe life in the town from above, adding another layer of humour and imagination to stories based on real events. The combination of factual local material and theatrical invention is expected to give audiences a different way of recognising familiar experiences and places.
The final production also reflects the large number of people who have contributed to the IF! Inclusion Festival throughout the past year. Professional actors have worked alongside community casts, local choirs and young people, creating opportunities for residents to become involved in performances rather than simply attending as audience members. That broad participation has helped make the festival a community-focused programme, with different groups contributing their own experiences, skills and perspectives to the performances.
Ashton said audiences had followed the programme from its opening show and had gone on a journey with the festival over the course of the year. She said the dramas had captured qualities including tolerance, resilience and strength of community, while also connecting with audiences’ imaginations. The final production therefore brings together not only a collection of local stories, but also the wider experience of a festival that has involved performers, community groups and audiences over an extended period.
Alongside the performances, visitors can also see an exhibition at Cooke’s Studios featuring costumes and props from productions staged during the festival. The display provides an opportunity to look back at the work created over the past year and see some of the physical items used to bring the different stories to life. It adds a visual element to the closing celebrations and gives visitors another way to explore the festival’s history before the programme comes to an end.
The exhibition includes a Barrow Toile fabric featuring 80 images of the town, alongside 300 alternative blue plaques created by residents to celebrate local figures. The pieces provide another expression of local identity, highlighting people, places and stories that residents consider significant. Together with the costumes and props, they form a record of the community involvement that has been central to the festival and its aim of celebrating Barrow through creative work.
The final performances are scheduled for Friday, October 2, and Saturday, October 3, at Cooke’s Studios on Abbey Road. The Friday performance has already sold out, while tickets for Saturday are available free of charge or through donations. The availability of a free or donation-based performance gives local people another opportunity to attend the festival’s closing production and experience a show created specifically around the stories and character of their town.
The accompanying exhibition is also running across several days around the closing performances. It is open from noon until 5pm on October 1 and October 4, while visitors can also view it between 6pm and 10pm on the Friday and Saturday evenings. This provides opportunities for people attending the performances, as well as those simply interested in the festival, to see the costumes, props, fabric artwork and blue plaques connected with the programme.
The IF! Inclusion Festival has been supported by a number of funding organisations, helping Theatre Factory deliver the year-long programme of performances and community activity. Funding has come from Arts Council England, Westmorland and Furness Council, the John Fisher Foundation, the Granada Foundation and the Garfield Weston Foundation. Their support has contributed to a programme that has brought professional theatre together with community participation and local storytelling.
The festival’s closing production comes at a time when Barrow is continuing to develop a number of wider cultural and regeneration projects. Against that backdrop, a play centred on local people and events provides an opportunity to reflect on the town’s character and the experiences that have shaped its communities. The production’s emphasis on real stories also gives audiences the chance to see familiar aspects of Barrow presented in a theatrical setting.
With its final show, 67,000 Barrovians Can’t Be Wrong brings together the themes that have run through the wider festival, from community participation and local history to humour and shared experiences. The production is designed as both an ending to the year-long programme and a celebration of the town that has provided its inspiration. For those who have followed the festival from the beginning, the closing performances offer a final opportunity to see its work come together on stage.
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