Steve Pratt talks to the founding members of the Sprite Productions company as it celebrates a decade of visits to Ripley Castle, near Harrogate

SPRITE’S tenth anniversary production at Ripley Castle finds the company going back to the beginning and presenting again A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its first outdoor Shakespeare show.

The staging sees Sprite’s founders and married couple Liam and Hester Evans-Ford switching roles. In the first Dream she played Hermia and he produced. Now he’s taking a leading role of Oberon and she’s the producer.

Their six-year-old son Matteo is playing as the changeling boy. He even had some advice for director Charlotte Bennett. “He said he had a Captain Hook costume and he could wear that because not many people in the village had seen him in that one,” she recalls.

Dream is the only one of Sprite’s productions that Bennett hasn’t seen. She’s worked as an assistant or director on the others. “I’m actually quite glad I didn’t see Dream or I might think that’s what we did last time and have preconceived ideas,” she says.

Only the night before we spoke she’d come to the conclusion that Dream isn’t actually set in midsummer. She thinks Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, have messed up the seasons with their arguing causing the summer to carry on into December She’s chosen to set the play in the late Victorian period, the 1880s, in a strict and uptight society, reflected in the corseted look of the costumes. Rather than gentle and ethereal, the fairies are loud, boisterous, flamboyant, arrogant and passionate. “The idea is that they are lovers of life. Every minute they live is a joy,” she says.

The cast is a mix of returning actors and newcomers. The fairies will have a big part to play in leading the audience around the wood in the promenade production.

Ten years ago the first Sprite production came out of “a bunch of people who didn’t have any jobs over the summer” as Hester, who comes from Ripley, puts it. “Did we envisage we would be here ten years later? No, I don’t think we did.

“Our achievement of being a privatelyfunded professional theatre company for ten years is something I feel very proud about because I don’t think there are a lot of them.

We did have a dip where it was really hard but we managed to push on through that because I think it’s important to keep art and culture going.

As a company, it’s got better and better each year. The people working for us have got better.

We all understand we want to create great theatre.”

Bennett says she almost underestimates how much she loves it until she returns. “As soon as I get into the first week, I think I really love this job. I love the work, the setting, everyone being here in the same village and focussed.

It’s really immersive and collaborative. It’s not about the formalities of making theatre, it’s about everyone making good theatre. That’s where it’s special. There’s no preciousness around it.

“It’s not about turning up and doing a shift, but working together and working hard – and have a really nice time while you’re doing it.

It’s a big task to get a show of this size together in three weeks. You’re working outside against the elements and working off a different energy system which takes time to get used to.

It just feels really special.”

In the first year – 2005 – Sprite played to around 1,000 people over three weeks of performances. A decade later that’s risen to 3,500 and around 600 local schoolchildren.

But next year Hester, who also has a daughter Marilier who’s nearly three (she was born on the open dress rehearsal of Macbeth) and the team is taking a year off to re-evaluate priorities. “Ten years is a long time and it does take a lot of time and, we all know, money. Liam has been working really hard and obviously both of us doing this means there isn’t a lot of time for us together,” she explains.

“There’s been a fair few times when we’ve been scrabbling it together to make it work both financially and emotionally. We’ve reached our aim – my mum, who was really ill, wanted us to get to ten years. We’ve done that and I genuinely believe that’s amazing for a company that doesn’t receive any money, especially with the standard we produce.

“There are still endless possibilities of what we can do but I would love a summer with my kids.”

Of the many good good moments but Hester remembers particularly a late night performance of Macbeth when it snowed and hailed. “The whole of the walled garden was covered in ice and during the show it began to melt. This fog appeared and when Banquo appeared as a ghost he stepped put of the fog and it was amazing. It was one of those moments you thought, “that’s why we’re doing it".