Skip to main content

Flash Festival 2017: Can't Stop Theatre at St Peter's Church, Northampton

Upon entering the church to see Ben Sullivan's one man Flash show about alcoholism, you are presented with a neat little stage setting of a chess board with cans and bottles representing the pieces. It is a genuinely clever idea and lays the grounding for this extremely well performed and balanced play.

During the piece, Ben plays three characters affected in some way by alcohol. We have the first, a son of alcoholism, a disturbing and emotionally charged monologue portraying well the damage that drinks cause to the family. Then we move onto an occasionally comical posh guy and his checkered past with the devil's water. Finally, we have an Irish chap, a would-be quitter whose world is collapsing as a result of his failure.

Each of the characters is tremendously well created without descending into stereotypes and the three are expertly ordered as well, with the calmly relaxed delivery of the first moving into the much more physical of the second and finishing on clearly the saddest story. It is a piece of exceptional storytelling often in its simplest form with the static approach of the first piece especially, however, Ben brings to life the three characters with amazing skill and maintains them throughout, including a constantly solid Irish accent.

Often this play feels just too simple in the exterior, however, this is its strength, stripping away excesses of over complicated stage shows and relying on genuinely great acting and powerful narrative. A true gem of Flash.

Performance viewed: Wednesday, 24th May 2017

The Flash Festival 2017 ran between Monday 22nd and Saturday 27th May 2017 at three venues across the town.

Popular posts from this blog

Review of The Time Machine at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

As the title suggests, Original Theatre’s The Time Machine , importantly subtitled “A Comedy”, takes the 1895 novella by classic science fiction writer H. G. Wells of the same name as its source material. However, while the name is on the show, those expecting a straight, or even, as suggested, comedic full version of the story, will be disappointed, as this often drifts, like the machine of the title, out of control from the source material. What we do have though is a tremendously thrilling couple of hours of entertainment, where the unexpected, is very much at every turn, and indeed at times, even unexpected for the actors on stage. Original Theatre’s  The Time Machine  takes the form of a play within a play, here all three of the actors in the production are pretending to be playing themselves playing several characters within the story. This allows for much of the staple of plays that go wrong to rear their head, including dysfunctional scenery and repeated sequences, here used in

Review of Benidorm Live at Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes

I arrived at Milton Keynes Theatre to see this touring stage version of ITV comedy hit Benidorm with a distinct lack of knowledge. Having never seen the show, my information stretched as far as knowing it was set in a holiday resort in Spain (the title helps there), and that the humour generally resorted to the cruder end of the spectrum. However, having graced the screens for ten years, it was clear that Derren Litten's show had garnered quite a following, and indeed it was clear from the reception of the audience on the night, that this following was pretty much filling the theatre. The plot, such as it is for this stage show, is very much drafted from an episode of Fawlty Towers , and made a great deal more adult with its humour. The hotel manager, Joyce Temple-Savage (a sharp performance by Sherrie Hewson) gets wind that a hotel inspector is in, and the scene is set for seeking them out and all the obvious cases of mistaken identity. It's thin and doesn't fill

Review of UoN Fringe 2019: Working For The Man by Naked Truth Theatre at The Platform Club, Northampton

When looking at the prospect of the Fringe performance Working For The Man , it is slightly difficult to work out who is the bravest person involved in this remarkable one performer, one audience member show set totally within or around the edges of a car. I guess I would in my case, say myself, but it takes some daring for performer Ellie Lomas of Naked Truth Theatre to also create a piece that offers the boldness that it does. Working for the Man is perhaps unsurprisingly about the sex trade, and explores exploitation and how, or if, prostitution is taken as a serious profession. It involves no live audio dialogue from performer Ellie Lomas, instead, she inhabits a purely physical performance, that is progressed by the use of a pair of headphones which you are given at the start. Across this audio are instructions of what to do. "Get in the car", "sit in the middle seat in the back", "open the glove compartment" etc, as you move to different areas