Save The Merchant of Venice Wellington Young Actors

We are an award-winning youth theatre company of passionate and hard-working 12-17 year olds. We have been working on our performance of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice since April- due to be performed 19-21st October as a double-bill with our friends performing The Winter's Tale. We have run into a pretty big obstacle.

Two of our lead actors have just dropped out saying they don't want to do the show anymore. One was playing Bassanio, the second biggest role in the play. We are seven weeks out. Usually this would stop a production all-together but not us!

We have new young actors who know Shakespeare ready to jump into the roles and to be guided by our director, Deborah Rea. We just need to rehearse them.

We need money to pay for extra rehearsal time and spaces. Currently we only rehearse for one 1.5hr session per week. That's now not going to cut it in the time that we have left. We need to hire another room in our current rehearsal time so that two roles (and the rest of us!) can rehearse simultaneously. We also need the same set up for a few hours on the weekend as well as some rehearsal time in the upcoming school holidays.

We have funded this production through raffles and bake sales but we didn't budget for having to re-rehearse two key roles at the last minute.

We need your help to keep the show alive so that all 16 of us can bring our months of hard-work onto to the stage.

Can you save The Merchant of Venice? The show must go on!