IT MAY have one of the stranger titles for any play - Tuna Fish Eulogy - but for Heswall's amateur Riverside Players it proved a winner. The play by Lindsay Price won the company three of the major prizes in the All England Theatre Festival Northern Area Final. The production itself won the Silver Stag for the winning company. Rick Sawley - playing "Man One" - picked up the Elma trophy for the best actor while Ruth Griffiths received the Harry Mellor trophy for set designs. "We swept the board," declared a jubilant Eric Murch, president of the Riverside Players yesterday. "It was a tremendous production from a wonderful cast." Aptly, the awards came the year after the society celebrated its diamond jubilee. The Players present four main productions each year in the Heswall Hall alongside a play for children each January. The winning production, directed by Andy Webster and a featuring a cast of just four, was staged at Grange-over-Sands for the Northern Area final. It will now go forward to the English Final at the Barnfield Theatre, Exeter, on June 11. If successful there, it will go to Northern Ireland for the British final. It is not the first time the society has been successful in the championship. They have reached the all- England finals several times including 1996, 1999 and 2001. In 1995 they won the all-Britain finals with the play Skirmishes by Liverpool writer Catherine Hayes. Meanwhile, the New Everyman Youth Theatre has been selected to be among just seven youth companies to perform at the Lowry, Salford, in June. They will be part of the National Theatreproduced Shell Connections festival. With sponsorship from Shell UK, the festival commissioned a number of new one-hour plays from leading British playwrights. The New Everyman Youth Theatre will be performing Citizenship by Mark Ravenhill, the writer of Queer as Folk and Shopping and F------g. His new play is about a teenage boy who has a dream about kissing a shadowy figure but can't tell if it is a man or a woman. It is described as a bittersweet comedy about growing up. Citizenship is at The Lowry on June 18 at 8.15pm. | 
