New Forest Players 
Ballard School, New Milton
Jon Cockeram
22 July 2026
Everyone loves a wedding, right? A joyous occasion where the happy couple can be celebrated and happy memories made. But everyone’s also got stories about those weddings, the ones where something goes a little bit wrong; the one with an aunt who drank a little bit too much and started making out with a groomsman, or the one where two sides of the family decide that today is the perfect day to reignite a feud that’s been simmering for years. If we’re lucky, any wedding has at most one teensy problem; Chris Chibnall, the creator and writer of TV show Broadchurch, has instead envisioned a wedding where pretty much anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Rachel and Scott, played by Mairi Holmes and Elliott Burgess, are the happy couple-to-be who just want a quiet, simple and above all low-budget wedding. Mairi and Elliott play their characters very well, showing their hopes and frustrations in the face of significant adversity, mainly in the form of Rachel’s family.
Liz, the Mother of the Bride played by Chrissie Derrington, has her own ideas for what the wedding should be like. Using the full spectrum of tools at her disposal, from emotional blackmail to outright not telling people things, Liz gets her dog-obsessed husband Mel and soon-to-be-divorced eldest daughter Alison (Colin Bailey and Eloise Jackson respectively) to help organise everything to her satisfaction. All three of these characters had some real emotional range with perhaps the hardest hitting moments of poignancy in the play.
Add into this potent mix Alison’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Mike, Andy, the son who still has some unresolved issues hanging around and Graeme, a well-intentioned but slightly hapless vicar (Alex Cook, James Rowe and Dave Woods) and you’ve got a recipe for a wedding that really does go wrong in the funniest ways.
The staging is done very effectively – New Forest Players have constructed the perfect garden to have a wedding in, and bits are added throughout as we get closer to the big day. There are some very physical moments involving the set which were pulled off very nicely, and the set-design and construction team should be applauded for making them all work. An extra nice touch was having Mike, the aforementioned soon-to-be-ex-husband, playing the guitar and singing (mostly) wedding-appropriate songs in between the scene changes, adding a nice interlude as well as some genuine laughter as he seemed to pop up out of the most random places to strum away.
Were there any problems? Only minor ones, and these can mainly be chalked up to opening night nerves. There were a couple of tableaux where, whilst the guitar was being played, some of the cast seemed to stay in character and others seemed to stand stock still, which seemed an odd contrast and didn’t quite work. Additionally, there were a few cases where people spoke too quickly and without clarity, and a couple of places where vocal projection wavered a touch, meaning that some words were lost. However, as mentioned, these were all minor and didn’t detract too much from the overall performance.
Overall, though, the New Forest Players have done this play justice, with great acting allowing both the comedy and the emotional vulnerability contained here to shine through. Director David Luker has done a very good job of staging this, and the entire cast and crew should be proud of what they’ve done.
Worst Wedding Ever continues at Ballard School, New Milton, until 25 July
