Royston-based Corvus Amateur Drama Society (CADS) is hoping its latest production will impress the judges at the Welwyn Festival next week.

The festival this year is a bit different from normal due to lockdown restrictions, as it will be entirely online with groups sending in filmed versions of their work.

CADS secretary Michael Young said: "We’ve really been missing the chance to perform during the pandemic and this seemed the ideal opportunity for us to do some proper acting.

"Local author Roy Maddox has written a couple of pantomimes for us in the past, and also adapted the one-act play Strangers on a Film, which we had hoped to enter into several festivals last year before these were cancelled.

"We managed to persuade him to create a piece specifically designed to be performed and recorded on Zoom, and we’re delighted with the result.”

Roy's play, 'Seven Movies', consists of a series of online meetings taking place over several months. It tells the story of a group of neighbours who have formed a film club, where each month they will watch the same movie and get together online to discuss it.

However, over the course of the play they start to learn more about each other than they were perhaps expecting, and more than some of them might be comfortable with.

Michael, who directed and recorded the play as well as taking one of the roles, added: "We have some great actors, a couple of them new to CADS, and the script is very funny.

"We've also got some brilliant incidental music, specifically composed for us by one of the cast, Sam Herbert, so we're hoping the adjudicator at Welwyn - and more importantly, the audience - will like it."

Seven Movies is being broadcast as part of the Welwyn Festival on Wednesday, May 19 at 7.30pm.

The festival starts on Monday, May 17 and lasts all week. Tickets cost £4 per evening, with two or three different groups being featured each night and an adjudication at the end of the evening’s show.

The full programme and details of how to book can be found on the Welwyn Drama Festival website at https://welwyndramafestival.com or via the CADS website at www.cadsroystron.org.uk