THEY are a national touring company based in Huddersfield and are about to celebrate the New Year with a big, new production.

Dark Horse, resident company at the Lawrence Batley Theatre, has a bright, new comedy written by its artistic director Vanessa Brooks, and a fistful of tour dates for next year.

What better start to 2013 for this innovative company which produces top quality, original theatre pieces performed by its highly trained team of actors.

Recent productions have included Hypothermia which went on national tour, plus two other works, Colony and Harvest, which also premiered at the Lawrence Batley Theatre.

Eight of the company’s actors appeared earlier this year in Channel 4’s hit tv show, Shameless.

Dark Horse is one of the UK’s leading theatre companies working with learning disabled actors.

It creates new and original pieces for mainstream audiences, all of them in recent years written by Vanessa Brooks.

The company also delivers formal actor training for people with learning disabilities and it is these skilled actors who in recent years have brought to life a series of magical shows by Vanessa.

The company’s latest tour will be Sing Something Simple, a comedy written for four actors.

“I wanted to write something that would appeal to a broad audience,” said Vanessa.

“I was trying to think of something that had popular appeal, vibrancy and familiarity. That’s important in comedy.

“Sing Something Simple came into my head. It was on Radio 2 on a Sunday night and I remember my mother would be in the kitchen singing along to all the songs.

“I used to be waiting for the Top 40 which came on afterwards.”

But Vanessa realised that just as the programme had lodged in her mind, it would evoke strong memories in many others. Vanessa went out and got a CD with all the Sing Something Simple songs on it.

“Loz Kaye, who did the music for Harvest has had to listen to a lot of these tracks because they will form the soundtrack for the show.

“We’ve listened to the Cliff Adams’ singers and remembered people like the pianist Mrs Mills and band leader Geoff Love. I’m a bit of a sucker for easy listening.”

From the ensemble of Dark Horse actors, it is actor Joe Spoulle who will play a pivotal role in Sing Something Simple.

Joe is 24 and has been with the company for three years. He has appeared with Dark Horse in Colony, Harvest and in Shameless.

In this new show, he plays Spencer Parkin, a young man who hails from a family steeped in music.

His mother, Val, is a jazz singer, his brother Kit has the good looks and the voice to make him a hit in the music business. And Spencer, who reveres his late grandfather who was a backing singer extraordinaire, can’t sing a note.

“A lot of our performers in Dark Horse are very strong physical performers, as is Joe,” said Vanessa..

“But he surprised me in Colony in that he absorbed and dealt with the language well. The show had a Restoration feel to it but he absorbed that really well too.

Dark Horse’s recent shows have been staged in the round but in Sing Something Simple, Vanessa has decided to switch to the more conventional end-on performance setting where the actors will address their work directly to the audience.

It is another learning curve for Dark Horse and its actors but also an opportunity to continue their development as actors.

“It’s a choice that was in some ways informed by Joe’s personality,” said Vanessa.

“He’s very out front. He had some performance experience when he joined Dark Horse. He was very self-aware and very audience aware. That was quite different for us because we tend to work in the round which is very different. It’s to do with connecting.”

The production will also break new, technical ground for the company.

“I decided we needed to do something about digital production. We’ve done a lot of that around previous productions. I thought we should have it in the show.”

Inevitably, that choice has had budget implications and the initial idea of having five actors has reduced to four. But there is one big advantage.

For the first time, one character, Spencer’s grandad Gerry, will appear as a digitally projected character.

“All these ideas came together before I had written the show.”

But those ideas blossomed in the most powerful way in Vanessa’s script for Sing Something Simple.

She has written a piece about a family, its hopes and its dreams and all of those things with which an audience can identify.

At its heart are two brothers, Spencer and Kit Parkin played by actors Joe Spoulle and Richard Maxted.

Kit is his mother’s ‘golden boy’ and heading straight for the top of her beloved music industry. But Spencer, the first member of the Parkin family in memory who can’t sing a note, is clearly not.

Not that Spencer is going to let that stop him. When Kit packs it all in and joins the army and Spencer is left looking after their distraught mother, he decides to make things better the only way he knows how, by entering a singing competition!

Before he knows it, he’s standing on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, clinging onto the inspiration of his late granddad Gerry Parkin. This could be Spencer’s time to shine – couldn’t it?

It’s a bitter-sweet comedy which will encourage all who see it to make the connections and pick at their own memories for moments of joy and sadness in their own lives.

Starring alongside Joe will be three non-learning disabled actors, Richard, Alwyne Taylor and Heather Dutton.

“All three are London-based, though Heather’s grandparents coincidentally live in Huddersfield,” said Vanessa.

“I’d worked with Alwyne on a couple of things before. She was terrific in those and is a fantastic comedienne.

“Then I went to West Yorkshire Playhouse to see a production of Annie and I had no idea Alwyne was in that. It was lovely to see her and catch up with what she’s been doing. She was very interested in the company and the work we did.”

“This play was beginning to form and I thought she would be good.”

“After I’d met Alwyne again, I began to conceive the character of Val around her.

“Heather is from Newcastle and does a really good Cheryl Cole impression! Both her parents are music teachers.

“When she got to 16, Heather got fed up with school and did various jobs including working in a burger van outside a B & Q.

“Finally she went to the drama school, ALRA and found she was an actor.

“She came into her audition with her violin and played a great piece of music. She said her boyfriend had just bought her a mandolin so we’ve written that into the show.

“Heather is a really funny young actor.

“Richard went to Central (drama school) and has a wonderful, ethereal quality about him which works really well because in the play, his character goes missing. We see him as a bit of an apparition at certain points in the play.

“I can’t wait until they all meet each other and we get down to rehearsals.”

That should be in February and the LBT gets the premiere of this exciting new show in March before it goes off on a national tour.

For further information about the company visit: www.darkhorsetheatre.co.uk