Ann Jellicoe is probably best known for her discovery and development of the principle of Community Plays which began in the late 1970s. Following the immense success of her first Community Play: The Reckoning in Lyme Regis, her home town, she set up the Colway Theatre Trust to explore and develop her ideas. The form, as created by her, involves a small town in a two year creative quest to create a piece of Theatre which shall celebrate their community and involve hundreds of people in making and experiencing a work of art. The process will release enormous amounts of energy, refreshing and reinvigorating the community itself. With the guidance of a experienced, professional Community Play worker a number of meetings and discussions are held and a series of committees set up to begin working in various areas both geographical and social, networking and rousing interest for the play and to prepare the ground. All these people will become dedicated supporters of the work and carry their experience forward to the future when the play itself is over.

Early in the process a professional playwright of national, or international standard is commissioned e.g. David Edgar, Howard Barker, Charles Wood and Ann Jellicoe herself who have all written Community Plays for the CTT. The playwright works with a Research team to find a subject for the play in the town’s own history. The play is written for a large caste of 120 – 180 but hundreds of others will be involved in all sorts of way including helping to collect materials for costumes and properties, which will be made by local people. Stage management will involve set building and painting, lighting, and alterations required to equip and redesign a space for a very large promenade production as well as running the show itself. Others will attend to publicity and organising events which will raise money and awareness. A Finance Group will seek larger sums from sponsors and others. A local person will be appointed (paid) Play Officer and it will be their job to help organise and administrate all this activity. After the play is over all these people, with their commitment and experience, will be important in helping carry on possible future work. (The town of Dorchester is now planning its fifth Community Play).

Later in the process a small professional team will be appointed to guide volunteers in their various fields in helping create the production. The professionals will also set up workshops, prior to rehearsal, which will begin to teach acting, design and music skills but will also encourage an atmosphere of mutual support and enthusiasm. Anyone and everyone who wants to act in the play will be welcomed, and will be a real character not just part of a crowd. The dramatists must prepare for this in their writing. Four or five months before production the playwright will give a public reading of the play Auditions for casting follow with three months rehearsal climaxed by about 14 or more performances. With very few exceptions all performances will be of the very highest standard and all will sell out.

Ann Jellicoe had wanted to work in theatre since her earliest childhood. She trained at the Central School of Speech & Drama and later acted in repertory and small theatres. In 1949 she was commissioned to study the relationship between acting and theatre architecture, this led to an interest in the Open, or three sided, stage. To explore the possibilities of the Open Stage she set up the Cockpit Theatre Club, a Sunday Theatre Club using young professional actors otherwise tied up in small parts or understudies in the West End at a time before TV offered more varied work.. Returning to teach at the Central School she became interested in the dream like free association of ideas which may sometimes be seen in improvisation.

In 1956 the Observor newspaper news paper announced a high profile Playwriting competition which was clearly looking for new writers and new ideas. Stimulated by this challenge Ann Jellicoe wrote her first full length play The Sport of My Mad Mother using many of the ideas she had seen at the Central School. The Sport of My Mad Mother won a prize in the competition and was produced at the Royal Court Theatre directed by George Devine and Ann Jellicoe; but its innovatory style attracted hostile reviews. Six more of her plays were subsequently produced at the Royal Court. The best known is probably The Knack which was filmed and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In the early sixties she was commissioned by the Girl Guides Association to write a play which should celebrate fifty years of guiding. The play was to be produced with a caste of nearly a thousand British and foreign guides in the vast arena of the Empire Pool Wembley. The Rising Generation was much in the style of The Sport of My Mad Mother and was too innovatory for the Guides. It was produced at the Royal Court Theatre (with a much reduced caste) for a Sunday night performance when it was an outstanding success. In 1971 she was appointed Literary Manager of the Royal Court Theatre and during this time formed many contacts with contemporary writers which were later to be of great use in her work.

In 1973 Ann and her family left London to live in the West Country. All her experience had given her the confidence to set up very large plays with the minimum of means and the maximum of volunteer help. She wrote a play for the local Comprehensive school which her children attended. In the event the production proved too big for the on its own and help began to be sought amongst local people and a few professionals. Thus the Community Play was born. Since then Ann Jellicoe has produced and directed twelve such plays including an extremely successful Danish production. The work is now being carried on by many others, some of them trained by Ann Jellicoe. Community plays, as a truly popular, grass roots movement, are flourishing.