The Penguin Club can help find technicians for your production by advertising to our membership; our members will contact you directly if they are interested in helping. In return we ask that you promote the Penguin Club in your show programme. If we are able to assist we make a small charge to offset our running costs; however we cannot guarantee to help. Please contact us to discuss your production; please read the notes below before getting in touch.
The essentials
- Please include our programme blurb in your show programme.
- We charge nothing for small shows (typically venues under 100 seats) and £20 for large shows. We will waive this charge in some circumstances, for example if it’s the first time we work with a company, or if you only receive help from one or two of our members.
- If your get-in schedule requires a long day in the theatre we typically organise food for our members in the evening and will pass on an additional £20 cost.
- Our public liability insurance only covers our members; it does not cover your cast, crew or production. You are strongly advised to insure your production.
- The Penguin club does not manage or underwrite your show finances, nor does it provide, hire or store scenery or equipment.
Recruiting help for your show
We typically arrange a recruitment event (a.k.a. “Sign-up Sunday”) to put producing companies in touch with Penguins about twice a year. We also pass on requests for help to our membership via an e-mail list; to do this you need to help write an advert describing what you are looking for. A good advert:
- Has something to hook people’s interest. Remember your audience – a brief synopsis is good, but the key technical challenges are better; the lead’s motivation may be less interesting than the levitating spaceship that explodes right after the interval!
- Has the essential information:
- Who to contact about getting involved
- Show title
- Relevant build / rehearsal / performance dates / times
- Venue or location
- Says what you’re looking for help with – are you looking to help build the set in the run up to the production? To fill key production roles (Lighting designer, stage manager)? For crew to help put the show into the venue or to help with the running of it? Many theatrical job descriptions mean different things to different people so it’s worth looking at our production roles page.
It always helps people commit to your show if they know the scale of what’s being requested – both in terms of likely time commitment and of the level of experience required to make a success of it. We are used to engaging with people who are unsure of what they want or how to go about advertising to our members – contact us and we’ll try our best to help you.
We have some good and bad examples of adverts here.
We would encourage you to advertise for production roles even if you think you know which of our members you’d like to help you. It’s important to us as a Club that our newer members get a chance to get involved and that we foster a sense of opportunity; without that we are less able to grow our membership and in the long run less able to help you.