Every Brilliant Thing

Small Theatres, Uncategorized

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THE EDGE THEATRE

A Paines Plough and Pentabus Theatre Company
Cast James Rowland
Writer Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe
Director George Perrin

You are seven years old and your Dad tells you that your Mum has done a stupid thing. Actually your Mum is in hospital and has just tried to commit suicide. You feel guilty that you’re clearly not enough to make her want to stay alive. You’re seven years old and you need your Mum to want to stay alive. So you start to write a list of every brilliant thing which might just make her want to stay alive.
This a play with perfect pitch. It delivers on every level. What could be mawkish and heavy handed is instead life affirming and delightful. There is unbridled energy in this performance and absolute glee in each interaction but also moments of real affect where Rowland describes the reality of depression on relationships and family and the lasting impact on children.
This award winning play has toured America and Australia as well as Edinburgh Fringe and lots of small regional theatres here. It is a play that could easily run and run as it has a lot to say about life and due to its format every performance will be unique.
There is no big cast or eye catching set or clever lighting to hide behind. There is just a great script and soundtrack, with one actor on stage who is engaging with the audience well before the performance starts and whose impact lingers long after he has left the stage.
This is a uniquely engaging performance in that it exists only through the audience participating in an act of trust and taking on a range of roles on stage. Foreman gives out post it notes or annotated sketches or coffee stained scraps as the audience is first seated. As he calls out the numbers on the papers each participant becomes a part of the performance. Others are deftly engaged as actors voicing roles such as the veterinarian who euthanizes his first pet dog or the narrator’s father or his first love.
The success of each show relies on a willingness to participate that is elucidated by pure charm and warmth. From start to finish this ensures the attention of all involved as we wait for a cue for our part. The result is a theatre space full of energy and life. As the list grows so does the confidence of the participants as we move from the 7 year old child listing-

3. Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV.
To the teenager-
994 Hairdressers who listen to what you want.
To the adult in love-
1009 Dancing in public, fearlessly.
9995 Falling in love.
To the man who has known depression and loss-
999998 Inappropriate songs played at emotional moments.
1000000 Listening to a record for the first time……
Adding to the list I write-
1000001 Watching Every Beautiful Thing on a Summer evening at The Edge Theatre.

TOURING

 

 

SCORCH

Physical Theatre, Small Theatres


PRIME CUT PRODUCTIONS

By Stacey Gregg

CONTACT MCR

Happiness. Aching, constant, consuming. On there it’s more real than real life. I’m honest on there. I’m being honest. That’s important”

Out in the real world identity is often a fragile concept, a fluid construct that is subjective and individual to Self. The norms and legislation in Society requires objectivity. The two can make awkward bedfellows, and often produce confusion and misinterpretation especially when looking at gender identity.

The world of online gaming, avatars and messaging can be a haven for those who are confused or conflicted about their identity. Here anything is possible and anyone can be He, She, They or Ryan Gosling.

Amy McAllister is unobtrusively sat in the audience before she begins to snake in her seat as though shedding an unwanted or ill fitting skin or garment. Her movements are painful and beautiful to watch. She pulsates with energy and this begins to look like a interpretative dance performance. 

Then suddenly she moves to sit again in the group and starts to share. Like the confessional space of a therapy group we see an 8yr old girl who favours natty wsistcoats and an 11 yr old frustrated and horrified by burgeoning breasts. Then Kes emerges as a gender confused teenager experiencing online first love in all its bewildering intensity.

Performed in the round this is highly intimate and at times uncomfortably so. The staging is immersive as the audience become  the circle of trust Kes sits in at his LGBTIA support group but later that same circle feels like a threatening courtroom. The lighting in this piece is incredibly important informing when we look at each other and support the performer or when our faces blur and McAllister is alone and vulnerable.

The first half of this performance is funny and joyous as we engage with thie wee Norn Irish lad who embraces with an open heart and a hoodie to hide his girlish ponytail. The beautiful script by Stacey Gregg ensures a sense of understanding as Kes walks an increasingly tenuous line between what is known and what is left unsaid.

The later half quickly descends into the disturbing world of lawyers and courtrooms ill-equipped to deal with a changing society. Here we see the performance darken as a different confusion arises. Do the actions of a gender-confused young person require a lengthy prison sentence or a place on the sex offenders register? This play is based on real life cases such as that of Justine McNally.

SCORCH does not attempt to have all the answers but it raises many important issues. This is a worthy winner of multiple awards and is all the more remarkable emerging from Northern Ireland where only 5 years ago such a group as ours would this evening would have met in a secured room in Belfast’s Psychiatric Unit.

At Contact until 26 May

Schrödinger

Uncategorized

RECKLESS SLEEPERS

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CONTACT MCR

In 1933 Erwin Schödinger won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to Quantum Mechanics. he theorised a box in which a cat exists as living and dead at the same time. In 1998 Reckless Sleepers built that box – and now over a decade later, they are climbing back inside.

Quantum Physics and Mathematics were not my thing at school, thankfully cats, truths, lies, love, Magritte and alcohol were. Experimenters/ Artists Reckless Sleepers reopen Schrödingers famous box and delve in seeking questions and answers. Time ebbs, flows and pulsates as do the objects and the performers. The whole performance flows circling theories and story threads like water eddying in a pool.

The black cubic set is like a mad Goths playground with endless hidden doors and portals. Performers flow in and out or are thrown up and down with the plasticity of rubber boned children. Actions are repeated with methodic rhythm or frenzied intensity as though in some kind of Obsessive compulsive ballet.

There are snowstorms observed and experienced with magical curiosity. Water is sprayed, splattered, guzzled as a sometimes  lifeforce and other times a weapon. Crisp green apples as Magritte painted bring colour, sustenance and scientific creativity. Chalk is scrawled over black walls and suits then rubbed out or washed away. White sheets adorn tables, mold masks for lovers, or become bungee cords or chalk wipes. Numbers represent contacts and change as the 5 performers make contacts with objects. It is entrancing and engaging at every point. Things are happening and can’t always be seen, the result creates a desire as the observer to become plastic and flow with the performance and miss nothing.

Throughout this clever and mesmerising piece of physical theatre runs a pure child energy that is the creative force of all experimentation. It is anarchic and challenging, poetic and balletic and fiecely clever. If my school had had a Schödingers Box and a visit from Restless Sleepers I suspect I would have happily engaged with Physics and Mathematics. “It may seem like we have done this for the first TIME” I’m hoping I haven’t just seen this for the last TIME.

UNTIL 25TH MAY

Good Grief

Uncategorized

HOME

Written by Jack Rooke and his Nan 

Performed by Jack Rooke

Jack knows more about death and dying, grief and grieving than most people want to. He has lived through the loss  of his beloved dad when he was 15 and his delightful Gran who helped him develop this show has recently passed away.

This show is a walk through his experience. With a soft humorous voice and a wicked glint in his eyes those much loved family members are present in the room with us as certainly as they flow through his memories and his DNA.

Jack uses storytelling, family film footage and carbs to introduce the audience to death and bereavement. He uses humour to describe the journey through shock and disbelief via slices of  Soreen and custard creams and a multitude of lasagnes filled with Bechamel sauce and awkward pity.

He describes the benefits of a get out of class free card which allowed him to have a weep or a wank but most importantly gave him a badge of honour and acknowledgement of his loss.

This is a lovely piece full of charm and wimsy that feels very natural. There is banter with the audience but is never feels slick or polished. The connection he envokes is genuine but this is not about sharing his grief or fixing it. This is an intimate window into the world of loss and acceptance is an ongoing process. Jack is touring a show that has not “fixed”or “replaced” his losses. It is a means of affirming how shitty death is for those left behind but also how sweet life is when we fill it with laughter and compassion and carbs.

At HOME until 20th May then touring.

HEADS UP

Small Theatres, Uncategorized

HOME

Written and performed by Kieran Hurley

A desk, table top sound equipment, a candle in the darkness and a barefoot man in a suit. The rest is sound. A rich, melodic voice talking, talking, talking. Shifts of tempo, tales of random souls and the drip, drip, drip of impending doom. 

This 2016 Fringe Award winner is hypnotic storytelling but this is no bedtime story by candlelight, it is a ferocious and visceral assault. A tale of an apocalyptic event with a slow burning fuse that fizzes through four lives photoshoped from the media.

Mercy works in Futures and sees Armageddon coming, preaching a warning to others and seeming unhinged in her desperation. Ash is 13 and slut shamed in school, cringing in a toilet cubicle as her fragile teenage identity implodes. Abdullah is stoned and paranoid as he smiles and smiles pouring drinks in a  corporate coffee house. Leon is a coke fuelled pop star saving icebergs and bees in a fugue of media hype while his girlfriend gives birth alone.

These characters are fragmented elements of all of us. Their stories collide and connect and are reframed as the apocalypse shakes down our existence and our humanity. The sonic boom is deafening and seems to go on forever then bleeds into exquisite choral music. As Mercy repeats her mantra What we have is  now everything changes and we adapt as we always have.

Hurley is a gifted writer and a skilful storyteller. There is poetry is every gesture and anguished expression. This is a performance in which he wrings out every drop of self. The result may not be to everyones taste but at best it makes you wake up and really feel alive.
At Home until 20th May then touring.

The Road To Huntsville

Small Theatres, Uncategorized

20170517_200052.jpgThe Aldridge Studio, The Lowry

Part of WTF Wednesday in association with Word of Warning

Written and performed by Stephanie Ridings

Directed by Jonathon V McGrath

Cute cat GIFs are interspersed with websites for prisoners seeking penfriends or girlfriends or wives. The screen behind Stephanie fills with images of death row prisoners seeking love and a disturbingly literal happy ending. Did you know that the fourth biggest selling Author in the world, Danielle Steele has twice married prisoners? Her second wedding took place in a prison canteen after her fiancé was reincarcerated after cheating on her by raping someone else!

Stephanie is a lovely engaging woman who has just had a certain birthday and lives in Warwick with Stumpy her partner of 12 years and her one eyed fluffy housecat. She has a family with some issues and stressors based in Blackpool. She takes antidepressants but feels they may not be working. She is a performer and likes to research her subject matter thoroughly.

The show uses a blend of screen images and video interspersed with Stephanie telling the story of how she moves from internet research and ordering books from Amazon to corresponding with Jonny incarcerated on death row to being the last image he sees as he receives a lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas.

The brilliance of this performance is Ridings curiosity and how her bewilderment with the women who form relationships with these men moves to her own burgeoning connection with Jonny and his sister. The subject matter is difficult and highly sensitive regardless of how we view the death penalty yet Ridings  is never preachy or judgemental. Sitting in the front row as she sits opposite it feels like having a surreal  coffee with a girlfriend who has just visited death row on her holidays.

The tiny details make the most potent impact in this show- the institutional smell of Jonnys’ letters or the tiny windows in the prison or the view from a diner which faces Huntsville death room to the glorious lake views on the 45 mile trip from Prison to the Huntsville. Ridings has taken a huge personal emotional risk in making this piece of theatre and there are moments of genuine discomfort at her vulnerability and her decision making. The closing screen images of text messages appearing as she is trying to salvage her relationship with her partner are genuinely touching. It reminds us all of how universal is the need for love and connection whether we are at home in a faltering relationship or in solitary confinement on death row.

Winter Hill

Uncategorized

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Bolton Octagon

Writer  Timberlake Wertenbaker

Director Elisabeth Newman

Cast Denise Black, Souad Faress, Fiona Hampton, Janet Henfrey, Louise Jameson, Susan Twist, Cathy Tyson and Eva-Jane Willis

This is a new play by acclaimed  playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker which on paper has lots to recommend it. Winter Hill is directed by one of the youngest Female Artistic Directors in the country and stars a cluster of respected actresses and a great big hunk of rock near Bolton. Having a love of strong, feisty women, politics, literature and big, craggy hills this was ticking lots of boxes. Sadly this was a mishmash of poorly defined ideas and heavy handed caricatures of older women which ended up feeling like Last of The Summer Wine with Semtex.

The story of a book group compromised of a cluster of women who are all of a certain age with a back story of radical activism and feminism. Dolly played with gutsy aplomb by Denise Black is a women ready to ramp up her activism and intends to blow up this hotel as a fingers up to big business. She is supported in varying degrees by the other women. The ensuing events are fragmented by jumps in time as her daughter tries to piece together what really happened on the Hill and we see the survivors broken and incarcerated in a range of ways. The message seems to be that women cannot have it all. You cannot be an activist mother and bake with your daughter or plant a bomb to make a noble statement without making a total hash of it

The staging feels curiously unfinished as it is a mess of scaffolding, builders tools and masonry so it often feels likes watching a bunch of  intelligent older actresses rehearsing rather than seeing a polished end result. The messy stage is of course the building site of a partially constructed hotel on top of Winter Hill in Bolton. Not just any hotel but one fit for Russian obligachs and world leaders with a helipad AND a runway!! The problem with this plot device is its improbability as Bolton is not an obvious location for billionaires and its feels somewhat uncomfortable to allude to so many flight options when Winter Hill was the scene of an actual air disaster.

There is some really strong acting from a great cast and it feels like there is a genuine camaraderie of the Sisterhood on stage. I imagine Elisabeth Newman and the cast have had a lot of fun working on this project and the passion and commitment shines through. The play explores literary heroines, feminism, green issues, activism, terrorism and a host of other issues. The script struggles to cover so many major issues adequately while flitting in and out of time frames and attempting to convey drama and humour and lot of big preachy speeches and pithy one liners. The end result is a mess of good ideas and important issues which never get fully realised.

Perhaps the biggest frustration with the play is it feels like a wasted opportunity to show talented women of a certain age on the stage being unique and vibrant and thoroughly alive. However if you like your menopausal women badly dressed, a bit bonkers and as hot headed as their hormonal flushes with weak bladders and a penchant for books and booze then this is the play for you.

Until Sat 3 June

How My Light Is Spent

Large Theatres, Uncategorized

Royal Exchange Theatre

By Alan Harris

Directed by Liz Stevenson

Cast Rhodri Meilir and Alexandria Riley

 

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How My Light Is Spent. Royal Exchange, Manchester. Photo by Jonathon Keenan.

A phone connection at precisely 7.30pm every Wednesday evening  for precisely nine minutes has become the only meaningful social connection in the life of 34 year old Jimmy living at home with his mother in Newport. Kitty, a telephone sex worker saving up to study to be a Psychologist is his only conduit into an existence where he matters and he feels fully alive.

Winner of the Judges Award in the 2015 Bruntwood prize this is a darkly comedic look at social disengagement and how easy it is to literally disappear without the social constructs of family, work and interpersonal relationships.  This two-hander could be thoroughly bleak and grim but the whimsical introduction of an actual vanishing man brings a lightness to the play.  Rhodri Meilir is excellent, giving Jimmy a fully fleshed character who is socially clumsy, lugubrious and still desperately eager to open his big Welsh heart to love.  Alexandria Riley is simply wonderful as a  bruised but never broken woman with big dreams and limited options, however her character would benefit from further development as the role of Kitty is equally important to this play.

Both actors  also very effectively voice the other characters in the play bringing alive Rita as the mother who can engage with The Salvation Army but struggles to communicate with her son except by phone or through the bedroom door. Kitty’s topiary obsessed Landlord Stevo is a small divorced man who collects porcelain dolls as fragile as his hope of buying Kitty’s love. Mallory is the brittle, gobby daughter Jimmy was estranged from who swings in the park waiting for the light to go out at home before she returns to a disinterested mother. All reflect the themes of loneliness and invisibility and dispossession.

Staged in traverse this cleverly divides the audience while ensuring we are forced to look at each other as well as at the actors. Fly Davis  has created a stark bridge which both maintains a sense of   separateness acting as a barrier to connecting and a kind of stepping stone to reaching out to others. The use of sounds of keyboards tapping and swings moving in the breeze and naff music are really evocative and allow us to see the invisible and wish to connect.The lighting crucial in a piece about invisibility delivers on every level. The closing scene brought all these together under Director Liz Stevensons sensitive eye  to create a little bit of magic that  made my arms tingle like Jimmys.

I left the theatre wondering what became of the widowed lady who I used to chat to at the local supermarket before her job  vanished to be replaced by a hideous self service till just as Jimmy’s job vanished to be replaced by a coin bin. This piece is timely because it reflects the general misery of the reality of Austerity for the working class as redundancies and relationships breakdowns create a non-class of invisible souls while reminding us of how brightly any soul can shine if nourished an nurtured.

SHERMAN THEATRE until 27 May

THEATRE BY THE LAKE 31May- 24 June

 

 

 

 

TANK

Large Theatres, Uncategorized

HOME

DIRECTED BY Billy Barrett and Ellice Stevens

WRITTEN BY Billy Barrett, Joe Boylan, Craig Hamilton, Ellice Stevens and Victoria Watson

This is the kind of theatre experience that might leave an audience dumbstruck at times but is guaranteed to generate conversation in the bar afterwards. BREACH have produced a piece of partly verbatim theatre that can shock and provoke but is also a sensitive and moving portrayal of how inhumane humanity can be.

In the midst of Sixties Cold War paranoia NASA funded a ridulously indulgent experiment into animal neuroscience. John Lilley headed up a laboratory on St Thomas experimenting with 3 dolphins in captivity. The main protagonists of this true story are Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter a young male dolphin. There seemed to be little emphasis on hard science as Margaret had no qualifications as a researcher other than she was curious and liked dolphins. Lilley was also curious, mainly about what effect LSD might have on a huge brain- it might be useful to mention his best mate directed all the Flipper movies! The aim was to teach the dolphins to speak English and so improve Mankinds chance of communicating with extra terrestials should we ever meet any.

The high or low point of five years of research was a 10 week period in which Margaret and Peter cohabited in a watery home. Peter did not learn to speak English but Margaret did learn how to masturbate a dolphin so maybe not an entire waste of time!

TANK uses dried out tapes of some surviving recordings of this research to illustrate this fishy tale and lo fi microphones to reproduce Peters attempts at language. The large video screen is used to show the underwater film of Peter and Margaret while the four actors on stage work to create a prism like take on what really occurred in the lab.

The actors bicker on stage as to the detail of the actual events. Margaret was “ruggedly feminine” and wore heels or boots or ….. Pam the dolphin had dried out traumatised skin or was covered in concealed blood. This is an odd couple love story or it’s a girl wanking off a gigantic dolphin cock. At the centre of this piece is the many facets of the story. Love, science, philosophy- how do we each perceive an event and how does experience colour our viewpoint? Here the women are wearily sensible  and frustrated by the men who sexualise  events like smutty schoolboys.

Joe Boylan is superb as Peter. He physically evokes the power and curiosity of the young dolphin. His is a totally believable performance and as he dances with the others the vibrancy and naughtiness bubbling through is totally infectious. Sophie Steer as Margaret vibrates with passion and despair as she attempts to communicate with Peter. There is an innocence and a whimsy to her that makes her masturbation of this dolphin seem sensuous and natural rather than sexualised which is exactly how the research assistant described her actions years later.

There are some delicious moments as they all sensuously dance together with blank faces or as they strip down and  Boylan puts on his dolphin mask. The air of menace is never far way as they fantasize about Margarets ruination and death at the fins of a dolphin army.

This is raw and edgy and joyous, it is dark theatre. It reminds us just how crazy humans can be but there can sometimes be a little magic in the crazy. TANK is good crazy.

POSTSCRIPT:

Twenty years after these experiments I spent a summer in Windsor researching parenting and attachment behaviours in dolphins. Two mother and their babies and I got to observe and play with them. It was heaven on earth.   

I Capture the Castle

Large Theatres, Musical

Octagon Theatre, Bolton

Book : Dodie Smith

Adaptation and Lyrics : Teresa Howard

Music : Steven Ellis

Director  : Brigid Larmour

Five years in development this is the musical adaptation of a much loved coming of age novel. It is surprising that it has taken almost 60 years to produce a musical on stage as Smith herself an accomplished playwright adapted her book as a ‘play with musical notes’ in 1954. A labour of love by Larmour and her collaborators it is an enjoyable affair but sadly not terribly satisfying. 

Set in Suffolk in the mid 1930s it is narrated by its heroine the sweet but fiercely perceptive Cassandra. She aspires to be a writer and through her journal seeks to literally ‘capture’ the crumbling castle and its inhabitants. Her family the Mortmains are an eccentric bunch in the book but here they become faded characters stepping bleary eyed from the dusty pages of the original book.

James Mortmain, Cassies father, hides away in the turrets struggling with chronic writers block. Author of a successful and revered piece of literature he has written nothing for 10 yrs. Topaz his wild and bohemian  second wife is a former artists model who floats around making oatcakes to feed her impoverished family. The actors are severely limited by the script. When a major song for Ben Watson suggests his passion and adoration for his ‘very particular girl” it jars as though it speaks of characters from another stage. There is little sign of the delicious Topaz floating around wearing nothing but her boots or of a frustrated genius who has written the equivalent of Joyce’s Ulysses. This weakens the plotline. We never really get to see what Cassie sought to capture or understand the importance of nurturing a great second book beyond monetary gain.

Lowri Izzard is delightful in her professional debut singing beautifully and capturing the essence of Cassie. She shines and this coupled with weaknesses in the script and in the performances of her sister, their American suitors and her friend Stephen mean that it is hard to care about the other younger characters. The older women blaze a trail across the stage bringing energy and waspish humour. The standout number has to be ‘They’re only men’ delivered with gusto by Julia St John and Shona White. 

 The music is always good and effectively evokes both the countryside and the castle, and the glamour of the city.  The dance routines and use of physical theatre do not always work. They can  seem under rehearsed or poorly conceived especially when they are all in London dancing barefoot and Stephen is just wearing an overcoat like a would be flasher or when we see a randon human gargoyle who looks more like a hoodied thief trying to raid the castle.

The visual portrayal of the castle is a chaotic heap of old spindly furniture which is witty and memorable. It towers over the performers like a crazy croque-en-bouche at a buffet.

There is a lot to enjoy but it somehow fails to deliver what was originally intended. This was intended to take a classic book and give it the flavour of LaLa Land success with a nod to An American in Paris and Oklahoma. Good intentions but perhaps too many ingredients and cooks in the mix. 

At Oxford Playhouse 16-20 May