By Heidi Trautmann

KADS – Kyrenia Amateur Drama Society, a theatre group, first founded in 1974 with a first performance in the building of the Old Grapevine, the name KADS been given only later in 1987. More details you will find on the internet site http://living-in-northern-cyprus.com/review/kads/.

You’ll find there some directors’ names who have made KADS a renowned theatre group since 1974, names like Dorothy Haile, John Dooley, Dottie Jewett, Muriel Clutten and others. I have been watching KADS since 2005, have been to their plays, have talked to the actors and have even once helped painting the décor as my motto is: you have to be involved to understand the motor of a group. It is the bug of passion which bites amateurs to perform on stage, to smell its dust, to take on long hours over months to learn by heart your lines – and most of the plays are text-intensive – to fight stage fright and then to smell success or despair after the first performance.

This passion has brought together a rather new formation of KADS under director Lawrie Oxley for the recent play “Murder in Play” a funny play in a play, in many ways deliberately so very English. For many months they have been rehearsing  and were ready to go on stage in May for a four night show at the Girne Belediye Cultural Centre (right in the centre of the Wednesday Market) – it is their second play in this fantastic newly opened theatre  – and as I heard from Norma Warner and Tony Woods, members of KADS, all four performances were fully booked out. Besides some “old hands” there were some new members performing for the very first time and they were very good, no lines and steps missed, they played their parts well; for them it was I am sure a great experience.

Brian Coe was very good and funny in his double role as actor playing the dead and as inspector, and Claudia Hanna is a natural, her mimicry and body language are very good and - as I said - natural – I loved her American accent in this so very English play - .

Let’s see what KADS brings next to this lovely theatre. The young Belediye cultural director Serdar Tuksal is very active in getting the cultural centre running and he seems to be very successful in drawing the foreign community’s attention to it. There are many more plays planned for the rest of the year and it is always nice to enjoy a drink and talk during the break on the lovely terrace with a gorgeous view onto lower Girne.