Although their very existence is under threat, Rejects Revenge are ploughing ahead with a an exciting new production. Philip Key reports

YOU climb some rickety stairs heading for the top level of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre annexe. When you finally reach your goal, there is the welcoming sound of laughter coming from behind a painted door.

Open it and you are in another world, a rather surreal one. Someone is addressing a sideboard, another talking through a metal megaphone and there’s a chap plucking at a ukulele.

This is the world of Rejects Revenge, a Liverpool theatre company now in its 18th year who, over the years, have been making the British laugh at their own eccentricities.

They have even made overseas audiences laugh at their rather English comedies, from Belgium, Greece and Hungary to Pakistan, Singapore and Spain.

They were even the first official overseas theatre company to tour Albania – and they laughed, too.

The laughter in the rehearsal room is genuine, but maybe a little awkward, too, as Rejects Revenge is on the verge of extinction.

The Arts Council is withdrawing its £90,000-a-year support and, without it, Rejects will just not be able to exist. An Arts Council North West regional board has yet to ratify the decision, and that is the final hope for the company.

The company has lodged an appeal with all kinds of supporting documents and the final decision will be made early next month.

But, in the meantime, it is on with the show and the company’s latest – Here Be Monsters – promises ironically to be one of their best. It opens at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre next week, and all the company’s resources have gone into it.

This is what they were rehearsing, a science fiction epic set in 1908.

It has been written by Tim Hibberd, a co-founder of the company and now a freelance writer. He has scripted most of the Rejects’ shows.

“I have always wanted to write a show set in space,” he says. “We have written them set in every time period you can think of, Middle Ages, Victorian, Georgian, even 1990, when we did our first show, Staging the Revolution.”

But while it has a space theme, the era is Edwardian for Here Be Monsters. “Yes, it’s fairly up to date,” laughs Hibberd. “Just 100 years ago”.

The date is significant, just 100 years before Liverpool became European Capital of Culture, and this is indeed the company’s contribution to the occasion.

There is even a little dig at the theatre company’s own situation, in a plot line in which there are Science Council cuts because of the money being spent on the London 1908 Olympics . . .

The show developed out of a special Rejects Ensemble that met over two weeks last year with the help of Liverpool Culture Company money.

It’s a new idea, explains Rejects’ artistic director Ann Farrar, who is co-directing Monsters with Hibberd.

“It is a chance for creative people to come together and try out things on the next level. There are experienced people and young people, the young benefiting from our experience, we benefiting from their refreshing take on things.” Guest directors were brought in to try out new ways of working, and the whole thing worked wonderfully. It is a three-year project, the next two years sponsored by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.