Always on
This project successfully funded on 9th September 2025, you can still support them with a donation.
Keep Theatre Live!
Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway, United Kingdom
Aim
The Guild of Players, a Scottish charity and company which owns and manages the Theatre Royal Dumfries, needs your support.
The Guild of Players, a Scottish charity and company which owns and manages the Theatre Royal Dumfries, is seeking support from the local community and beyond, to avoid reducing the cultural programme and activities offered at the popular venue.
We Need Your Help:
Like many other organisations, we are facing increased costs of national insurance, energy bills and materials for our shows. We receive generous support from The Holywood Trust and the William Grant Foundation and earn two thirds of our income from ticket sales and other trading. However, it is getting increasingly difficult to find grants to cover the remainder of our costs, and this year we anticipate a gap of £30,000 which we need to fill to maintain our programme of performances and activities at current levels, and keep our prices affordable.
The contribution of arts funding grants to the Guild of Players budget is comparatively small but essential, and we want to raise enough money to ensure that if we are unable to achieve our funding targets the theatre will still be able to keep theatre live in Dumfries.
- Last year our 143 public performances reached an audience of 19,674
- We worked with 23 organisations, and provided 380 workshops for a diverse range of community members.
- Our resident amateur Theatre Company produces the town’s Christmas Pantomime, and a programme of exciting plays and comedies throughout the year.
- We bring the best of Scottish Theatre, Star Comics, and great music to Dumfries at reasonable prices.
- Our Youth Theatre runs five sessions a week for eighty members, and is currently working with the National Theatre and the Traverse Theatre.
- We provide spaces for the Wee Mousie Drama Club, Paragon Music, the Council’s drama group for adults with disabilities, and local schools.
- We run a “teaching theatre” providing pathways to employment in technical theatre, and host placements from “Project Scotland” to help people gain employability skills.
- We support local professional theatre companies, artists, and writers’ groups to create new work.
- As custodians of the oldest Theatre in Scotland - established in 1792 with the help of Robert Burns; and visited by J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan when he lived in Dumfries - we are developing the building as a heritage attraction.
Theatres are at the heart of our communities. They make us laugh, they make us think, they help our young people build their confidence, they bring people together.
Help Scotland’s oldest theatre keep it live.
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made