Celebration of love or corporate cliché?

Whatever your views on Valentine's Day, it's hard to escape the event's singular focus on romance.

But there is an alternative. Step forward Teddington Theatre Club, a community group dedicated to performing arts and helping local talent thrive.

This weekend the club are putting on their biggest live-streamed show yet, 'What's Love Got To Do With It?' which is themed around love in all its forms.

Organised by a team led by artistic director Lottie Walker, the show features a selection of plays, play extracts, poetry and prose readings and even musical interludes.

Aspects of love covered include friendship (The Jungle Book), familial (Little Women) and forbidden (Oscar Wilde's letters).

The bond between owner and pet is also represented (Greyfriars Bobby).

Walker, who is also co-hosting the show, said: "We've all had a tough year and many of us have had to draw on strength and resources we didn't know we had in order to cope.

"Our members and our audience have been directly or indirectly affected by the pandemic and although young love and blissful passion is, no doubt, evident amongst some of us, the comfort of a solid network of friends or the devotion of a family pet has been a real lifeline to many.

"And this is what we wanted to reflect."

She added that the club has been planning What's Love Got To Do With It? since November last year, while in normal times the programme is decided two years in advance.

Rehearsals for the live-stream started weeks ago and there are 150 pieces in total, performed by a cast of 80, some of whom are newcomers to the club.

The show will be performed on the club's YouTube channel which will be available for anyone to watch and comment on when the stream starts at 9am tomorrow.

Tomorrow's show includes readings from children's books, scenes from Shakespeare plays and love letters from LGBTQ historical figures in the morning, then a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the afternoon.

After this there will be extracts from a variety of plays of different eras alongside musical interludes, with that day's show finishing at midnight.

Sunday, which is also Valentine's Day, is less jam-packed, ending at 6.30pm with a performance of Pride and Prejudice, a play adapted from the Jane Austen novel, which Walker also performs in as Mrs Bennet.

"I do feel there's something for everyone in this programme," she said.

"From excerpts from the first Lesbian novel, "The Well of Loneliness" through to some stunning brand-new work by local writers and everything in between.

"They are all listed in the programme, so dip in to what you fancy but do stick around for something you don't recognise - you might be pleasantly surprised!"

Find out more HERE