#Cornley lore

[personinthepalace]

some fun facts from the tptgw program:

trevor is only doing the show so that he could get extra credit in his electronics module for his engineering course

he is in a metal band called Amoeba

he suggested doing "Full Monty - in the round" for the 10th anniversary gala night production

his only other credit is Croxley's Crazy Firework extravaganza in which he used home-made fireworks (this is from the ppgw program)

Oh! And there are some trevor lore that @the-irrelevant-trumpeter shared from the australian production of tptgw :)

do any of you guys have fun facts about Trevor Watson? a friend of mine is auditoning for the role in a local production. and I promised him that I would share some fun facts to help him prepare. but I'm struggling to think of some

[the-irrelevant-trumpeter]

THE NEW LORE WE JUST GOT FROM THE MOST RECENT TPTGW INSTA REEL?!?!? OH WERE SO BACK

[marvelmaniac715]

Someone, anyone, PLEASE talk to me about Mischief Theatre/the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society because I’ve seen Peter Pan Goes Wrong live, I’ve seen The Play That Goes Wrong TWICE, I’ve seen Mind Mangler and Good Luck Studios and I’ve watched every episode of The Goes Wrong Show at least three times, god knows how many times I’ve watched the recordings of Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong. I know all the lore and loads of quotes, I’ve even watched most of the Goes Wrong Alongs and the shorter pieces they made like the Children in Need social distancing piece, I just need to TALK ABOUT IT because I’ve run out of people to watch the show with at this point 😭

[vanessaslifecoach]

my roman empire is cornley lore. what were their first impressions? how long did it take for the group to form? did they ever go their separate ways? how did “cat” go? is there a vanessa and dennis wedding which goes wrong? i need a cornley novel. an encyclopaedia.

[personinthepalace]

omigod this is amazing!! thank you so much for sharing this!!! @cornleypolytechnicgoeswrong I know you will want a look at this :)

(Inspired by @personinthepalace 's tags on this post)

So here's the full programme from my recent Goes Wrong watch in London! (In true Goes Wrong fashion, I put it in my backpack to make sure it stayed safe, only to land back in Japan mid-typhoon, meaning my bag (and thus the bottom of the programme) gor wet. 😅 Very in keeping with Mischief's vibes, tbh! It's all dried out now, though.)

Will have to reblog a few times to get every page, due to the app's picture limit, so bear with me!)

[marshmellowtea]

ngl it is a little bit of a relief when i see contradictory lore about the cornley crew because it makes me feel better about my contradictory headcanons for them. like oh right the people who put on these productions don't always know what they're doing with these characters either lmao

[cornley-amateur-drama-society]

I really enjoy the vastly different headcanon vibes going on in #tgws bc on the one hand there's ppl like me who are more "cornley as pictures of cats" and on the other you have ppl who are doing deep emotional hc lore about the characters like their family history or relationships with their parents. Idk it's like a good mix i think to have in the tag bc it's good to see how other fans see the characters and how everyone is so united by this tragical theatre group ✨️����

[act2drama]

So I've got hardly any followers and not a single shred of "tumblr clout" and I'm not even from the US, but...

As far as I'm concerned, we're quite literally all in this together because oh the endless joys of the US/UK "special relationship"... So this is me essentially officially saying that I'm definitely someone you can come and talk to if it's all getting overwhelming (because I think we can all agree these next few years will inevitably hit that point a lot). Even if we've never spoken or even interacted before. So if you need a space to just vent about anything that's going on, or else if you want to talk random theatre stuff as a distraction including entirely inconsequential low-stakes arguments over why you think I'm wrong in my opinion that Ride The Cyclone is severely overrated (because having that kind of stupid inconsequential argument will at least give a moment of catharsis), discussing why certain shows/writers/performers are underrated, going wild over anything Starkid, or spending a frankly absurd amount of time coming up with the most ridiculous pieces of Cornley lore, or overanalysing the storylines of MMNI shows to the point where a significant part of your brain can no longer believe these things were improvised... Well, I'm always gonna be here for all of that. It's going to be a difficult and scary time for the foreseeable future (not just for the US), we're all gonna need to learn to take things one day at a time and finding one thing we can look forward to. And there's gonna be moments when you will need to step back for your own wellbeing. If that moment comes and I can be here for you, I'll be glad to. Even if it's just to have one conversation that gets you through another day.

[the-irrelevant-trumpeter]

omg hiii <3 normally a tag reblogger not a text reblogger but i’m going to this time because i have a lot to say <3 tried to just do some other people hadn’t already included in reblogs

once during murder at haversham manor, an audience member smuggled a dog in. it ran onstage during florence’s interrogation scene and bit sandra’s shin

max once got confused about daylight savings while trying to travel somewhere, and managed to accidentally fly to italy. trevor had to pick him up from the airport.

trevor managed to steal 6 movers and a par can from the apollo theatre, because he was dressed in black and white stripes and everyone assumed he was part of the production team for wicked.

dennis doesn’t have a passport, and once showed up at the airport with a piece of paper with “passport of dennis tyde” written on it.

there was an accident at one performance of murder at haversham manor involving a zebra. robert had acquired the zebra after losing a game of bridge the night before. trevor got rid of it after a 7 hour struggle.

robert owns a “rehearsal cravat” and “read through cuff links” that he must have during rehearsals.

during rehearsals for haversham manor, dennis was followed by a goose and they couldn’t get it offstage.

also during rehearsals, max decided he was going to make cecil deaf, turning all of his scenes into chaos.

robert believes that to depict envy onstage, you should put four large pinecones in your trousers and don’t hide the face you make.

robert once starred in a performance of taming of the shrew, but he cast an actual shrew to play alongside him.

robert once did a solo, outdoor, midnight reading of king lear. no audience members showed up. he still performed the whole play.

robert got fired from a mcdonald’s tv ad because he kept saying “i’m okay with it” instead of “i’m lovin it”

robert once did a promenade performance of three little pigs in which he played the wolf and actually tried to blow the houses down. it took him 15 hours.

robert has a marcel marceau act that has been turned down by 27 radio stations.

for a performance of a midsummer night’s dream, robert used method acting to get into character as puck by laying on a slab of ice and having 6 men hit him with sticks.

annie’s father owns an oil company called “twil oil” and has staff parties in the middle of the pacific.

sandra claims she turned down playing elizabeth swann in pirates of the caribbean to focus on developing her acting. apparently she was down to the final two.

sandra believes that edinburgh is an english county.

francis (the narrator in ppgw) is the frontman of a one-man post apocalyptic electro group “fellow”. he released his single “prisoner” onto youtube. op if you haven’t seen this video please let me know because it’s so good lmaooo.

trevor works out while listening to christmas music.

chris has been involved in a ponzi scheme before.

max learns all of his lines through a reward system — if he gets a line right, he gets a biscuit, if he gets it wrong, he gets a slap.

chris fell for the nigerian prince scam.

during a previous performance of hamlet, the cornley drama society kidnapped one of the newspaper reporters.

the cast trained for haversham manor with territorial army techniques to hone their self control. they marched through rocky pools barefoot for hours, and used this “intensity of suffering” to motivate their performances.

chris’s love of theatre began by bonding over gene kelly films with his mother (a tradition that continues to this day)

sandra is in a spice girls tribute band called “wannabe my lover?”

after a mix up during a production of 101 dalmatians, the cpds now has a surplus of hoolock gibbons theyre trying to give away.

“the baked bean” was a cruel nickname chris was given at school, as well as “green bean” and “runner bean”

hello mischief fans <33 please send in your most ridiculous pieces of cornley lore, i’m trying to compile a list for non-nefarious reasons

[nerdymariamania]

If we decide that Peter Pan on Broadway is canon to Cornley Drama Society lore, we either have to pretend that the Max/Sandra/Jonathan/Annie storyline isn't there. (And Vanessa isn't there, and Max's wealthy uncle loved their two other productions of Peter Pan so much, he wanted it on Broadway. And CDS was forced to work with NPH, etc etc) Or! That CDS is in a timeloop of their own immorality in the making.

[cornleypolytechnicgoeswrong]

Do you have any headcanons for how/ what order they all joined, or their ages in relation to each other? Usually if it isn't stated I assume the characters are the same ages as the actors, but in this case I can't even find that out for half of them!

I'll leave my tl;dr lists here and my reasoning below the cut for anyone interested!

Order they joined: Robert > Sandra > Annie > Chris > Dennis > Max + Trevor > Lucy > Jonathan > Vanessa

Age: Robert > Annie > Trevor > Chris > Dennis > Jonathan > Sandra > Max > Vanessa > Lucy [edit: I swapped max and Sandra]

This post is a really good breakdown of each characters history within cornley gathered from programs/playbills (which can be found in my #mischief playbills and #mischief programs tags). (thank you @reallyhardy it’s a very useful post!!)

According to this post they 'try so hard to make out like the characters aren't all the same age' but obviously are played by actors of the same age so it's a bit dependent on how you want to take it.

That said I've managed to work out some sort of order for when they each joined the group - this could be reflective of their ages too but also there's very little to suggest this

So I can say with some confidence that Robert was the first of the cornley gang to join. (40 productions since 2002 with them I have absolutely no idea how many shows they do each year this could be upwards of 4 shows a year or they just put 10 on one year for the lols) Followed by Sandra (interestingly, where Sandra had 11 acting credits and Chris 6, Chris was elected head of the group). I can then say Annie and Chris both joined around the same time (as of TPTGW Chris had 6 acting credits and Annie had been crew for 3 years so presuming they do 2 shows a year they joined at the same time however the number of shows they put on is very unclear leading me to think Annie may have joined just before Chris). I can confidently say Max and Trevor joined after those 4 (it's stated that tptgw was Max's first year and apparently Trevor said he never wanted to work with them again leading me to believe it was his first time experiencing CDS). Then I would say confidently that Lucy joined after those 6. Then I would say Vanessa joined last, possibly once they changed from cornley polytechnic drama society to just cornley Drama Society (though I'm not 100% certain of the timeline)

Dennis and Jonathan are very difficult. Jonathan seems to have very little information about him based on my personal feelings I would put him about the same time as Lucy simply because PPGW is the first time I can remember seeing them both. Dennis apparently couldn't get into any other societies but I truly do not know where to place him. I'd like to put him quite late on because of how much he struggles but I truly do not know, he moves in with Robert eventually so I would argue he had been there for a while. Maybe somewhere between Chris and Max+Trevor?

Age becomes more difficult since you can go to uni at any age and courses vary in length. Seemingly Robert wasn't a student, once again placing him at the top age-wise. I'd then put Annie due to her odd backstory involving a husband and 2 children for which I'd assume she'd have to have lived for at least a few years past 18. Then Trevor because apparently PPGW was his final year at uni for the 3rd time running. Then I'd put Chris followed by Dennis then Jonathan based purely on vibes tbh(if anyone could find evidence to prove or disprove I would be eternally grateful!) then Max (tptgw was his first year I believe so I'm saying he's relatively young) [edit: I'm swapping max and Sandra, if tptgw was Max's first year and Sandra had already been there for 11 shows I'd say she's older than him] I'd put Sandra [4th] from the youngest because apparently she won a child's beauty pagent thing in 1998 making me think she's about Lucy's age (considering Robert was working at cornley 4 years later in 2002), followed by Vanessa because I still feel like Lucy is somewhat younger than the rest of them. I would place Lucy solidly at the bottom (she's seemingly significantly younger than Robert, though she may be similar in age to the likes of Max and Sandra if you believe there to be a large age gap between Robert and the rest of the group).

[the-irrelevant-trumpeter]

i've actually tried to figure this out based on info given to us in programmes, shows and any other sources i could find! as you said, just my opinion based on the lore we've been given, so other takes are super cool! (i have tried to back my stuff up with evidence, but honestly canon is a construct and anyone can think what they like tbh)

i believe robert and annie joined around the same time, and were the first to do so, but in my opinion, annie was slightly before robert. as you mentioned, the ppgw programme says he's been in the society since 2002 — however, this clashes with the tptgw programme saying he's been in the society for almost three years. at this point, you just have to make a decision on which one you're taking as the truth, but for me, i don't imagine robert being several years older than the rest of them like the ppgw one wants us to believe (and it also conflicts with info about their ages in the christmas that goes wrong). so i choose to believe the tptgw programme. according to that same programme, she has designed, built, painted, stage managed and costumed every single cpds production in the last three years, putting her around the same time as robert. the reason i put her first is simply because hers says three years and his says almost three (a tiny trivial way to decide, but that's how i roll).

i put chris next, only slightly behind the two of them. we know that murder at haversham manor is his first show as director, and that he's only recently been elected the head of the drama society, but i believe he's probably been acting in it much longer than that. the only reason i put him later is because robert is described as the veteran actor of the company, implying he's been there longer. i'd only put chris a few months behind robert AT MOST, probably less than that — i think it's on brand for robert to exaggerate how much of a veteran he really is. and i agree that it's hard to imagine one of them without the other, so i don't think chris would be too far behind robert.

next i placed sandra. in the tptgw programme, it states that this is her eleventh season with the drama society. now i'm not in theatre so i tried to do some research on what a theatre season is, but i came up with a variety of results ranging from four weeks to a year. i personally decided to interpret her use of seasons as calendar seasons, since that also seems to be one of the uses in theatre (eg. a "summer season" in theatre). with this interpretation, this gives sandra almost three years as well (just three months off of it) — the only reason i put her below the other three is because in my headcanons of where their ages sit, chris robert and annie are all a little bit older than sandra, so she probably started attending the polytechnic a little bit later than the three of them. i think that all four of them were probably in close succession anyway, so it doesn't matter too much, but yeah.

after this i think there's a big gap until murder at haversham manor is actually performed about three years later. of the four remaining, i put jonathan next. the reason i think he joined so much later (compared to your headcanon) is the wording of his bio in the tptgw programme. it states "jonathan works as a model and is therefore excited to learn transferable skills by appearing in the murder at haversham manor". the way this is said makes me believe that haversham manor is his first performance with the society. if he had already been in several shows with them, he should already know these transferable skills, not be "learning" them. we know he's been involved with another theatre company, but given that their productions seem to be more based on exercise biking rather than proper acting, i'd say that haversham manor is his first role where he's a genuine actor (except when he was in casualty when he was five, but i'm not counting that for now) which is why he's "learning" these skills. this is a very tenuous point to base my timeline on, but that's how we do things here lmao.

next i put trevor — most of his stuff is fairly well-known info. he joined for haversham manor to get marks for his module, making it his first show. i put him above the last two simply because i think even if haversham manor was his first proper show, he may have gotten involved slightly earlier with some other stuff. but logically, the four down the bottom probably only have a week or two between all of them, so i'm not super concerned with the order.

lastly we have max and dennis. we know they're both in their first year at the polytechnic (this is explicitly stated for max, it isn't for dennis but i feel like it's pretty much implied. although maybe that's just me interpreting it that way). we also know that haversham manor is their first show with the society. so i can deduce that they joined fairly close together. i'm placing max ahead of dennis because given that dennis only joined the society after trying out for various sporting teams, it probably took him a little bit longer to sign up, whereas i think max would join the society almost immediately after starting. it also states that dennis is the newest member of the society, so this adds up.

in summary, i think that they really joined in two clumps — the four "veterans" of the society, three years prior to murder at haversham manor, and the "newbies" who are doing their first show with the cpds. the order within these clumps doesn't matter too much to me, but this is how i see it.

annie

robert

chris

sandra

jonathan

trevor

max

dennis

spare headcanons

straight up do not remember if i've posted about this yet but our shared Thoughts on what order the cornley gang joined in are that chris, robert, sandra, and jonathan are sort of the "core four" that were in it first... obviously 100% supportive of other takes; this canon is so loose that even if mischief came out tomorrow and shared an official list i would just be like "well that's your opinion"

anyway here's some of the reasoning:

fully cannot imagine a reality where either chris or robert were in the society without the other, so they must have joined at the same time (okay i know "40 productions since 2002" from the ppgw bio contradicts this but i am simply ignoring this) (part of the reason i'm ignoring it is because the tptgw playbill bio says he's been in the society for three years so like what is the truth).

sandra has apparently been performing since she was a child so, like, i'm sure she joined the drama society immediately. personal headcanon is that growing up in cornley she was doing shows with the drama society as a guest performer whenever they needed a child!

jonathan... this man has such little canon presence that i really can't argue for this in any way, BUT we just like to think that because he's doing the modelling, he's doing the gym stuff, he's doing a whole other gym theatre group, that at the start he was probably in the drama society's shows only sporadically. just did one every once in a while. this leads to the present day where robert is still like "jonathan's barely in this group, he's never in any of our shows!" and chris is like "robert, he's been in every show we've done for five years??" aka our headcanon as to why robert randomly omits jonathan from his line-up in drama festival part 1

and co-mod made me promise to make a post about our headcanon about the time cornley did cats so i'll be back to do that imminently

[elgatodeltren]

wishing there was more mischief content 😭

[savemefrommysolitude]

Found out my Peter Pan goes wrong programme from December 2015 if anyone wants the cornley lore!

[prismartist]

okay i’m biting. what’s this mischief theatre and what’s it doing

*slides in dramatically* HELLO!! i am so very glad you have asked about mischief theatre!!!!

they are a british theatre troupe that specializes in comedy. they have done a number of productions including plays, improv shows, and television shows! they got popular with the play that goes wrong, which you might have heard of :D and they're so damn hilarious. i heard some describe them as a british starkid (if. you know what starkid is lol)

fun fact about their stuff, some of their shows, notably the ones that have "goes wrong" in the title are all part of a connected universe!! the series follows a fictional theatre troupe called the cornley drama society (formerly cornley polytechnic drama society) with its own lore and ongoing arcs between the members!! so it's a theatre troupe playing fictional characters in a theatre troupe playing plays. it's confusing but you get used to it and the names if you follow long enough.

if you're interested in watching i recommend starting with the goes wrong series, mostly because they're the only shows you can find relatively easily; i think it starts with the play that goes wrong, then peter pan goes wrong, christmas carol goes wrong, and then the goes wrong show. all of those except the play have professional recordings which you could find on youtube, dailymotion, or reddit.

of course watching them in order is optional; the main focus is usually the jokes, but if you want to understand the relationship and schticks between all the characters you're welcome to do so.

for other recordings i know @/personinthepalace has a lot of links that you can ask for!!! i'm currently binging the mischief movie night in, their latest improv show. it's very good stuff.

so yeah, that's a basic rundown of mischief theatre, feel free to ask or search them up if you're interested!!! they're so great and i love them immensely