Skip to main content

Flash Festival 2017: Exposure by Imagine That Theatre Company at St Peter's Church, Northampton

The Play That Goes Wrong is undoubtedly one of my favourite plays (I have seen it three times so far as well), and Imagine That's Exposure is a clear homage to that very show (and indeed all its own influences through time). A group of five actors are about to perform a live television performance of The Picture of Dorian Grau, and they are absolutely planning on it going tremendously smoothly.

Lewis Hodson
Lee Hancock
It doesn't of course and for the best part, this little production does much of its buffoonery very well. There's more than a few issues and fluff, and at times it feels a little too wacky for its own good, however, this is slapstick and it is not meant to be clever.

The best part of this show, and one which The Play That Goes Wrong does perfectly as well, is the opening gambit of audience interaction. During the buildup to both shows, things are amiss, in one the set is falling apart and needs help (cue audience member), in this one two of the actors can't find one another and seek the assistance of the audience. This unscripted, reactionary piece featuring Lewis Hodson and Lee Hancock is genuinely and perhaps awkwardly the best part of the show due to an excellently reacting, mostly student audience. It makes you wonder if there might have been tumbleweed moments at the other two performances.

Lauren Scott
Hans Oldham
The rest of the show is hit and miss, when it works, like Lauren Scott being a tremendous bloke, it's great. When it doesn't, repeating the same joke, it annoys rather than thrills.

Exposure's biggest problem lies in being too loving of its influence. At times it is so close to The Play That Goes Wrong, is loses all of its own identity. Characters are largely similar, you have the audience reactionary one (Ben Barton), you have the lady and her relationship with another character, the Chris Bean identikit (Hans Oldham).

Ben Barton
I wanted to love Exposure simply because of its love of that other show, and to be honest I loved it more than I hated it. The opening sequence was magnificently entertaining and Lewis and Lee were a tremendous doubleact and perhaps the strength of that particular sequence that performance was detrimental to the rest of the show. It was however much more fun than glum and at the end of an hour that is absolutely fine.

Performance viewed: Thursday, 25th May 2017

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

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Drink by Contact Light at The Playhouse Theatre, Northampton

Contact Light Productions first came to the stage with their production of Bombshell on the Playhouse stage back in November 2017. It was a short, sharp, one-act play, which at the time I suggested could have been a longer two-act play and "could perhaps at times benefit from a little more light and shade, as it is unremittingly grim". So, for their second venture at the Playhouse, Drink, the short has become a sprawling three hour (with interval) production and the "unremittingly grim" has been dropped in favour of a play exploring the death of hundreds in an exploration of an American cult. Well, one out of two ain't bad.

Drink takes as the main inspiration the Jonestown cult, which came to prominence in the 1970s and eventually saw under its leader, Jim Jones, the death of 918 followers in November 1978. Jones established his cult in the Guyana rainforest, and here in Drink, the fictional cult leader Marcus Moores sets own his own commune, Mooresplace deep i…
Read more

Review of Hair at Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes

I first saw this rebooted version of the sixties musical back in 2016, when at the compact little Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester, director Jonathan O'Boyle first presented it on the stage. The intimacy of the venue, where you were never more than a few metres from all the cast, was perhaps one of its greatest impacts. So, in a space like the thousand-odd seater, Milton Keynes Theatre, the question is, does it still work? The answer is mostly yes.
Hair first launched onto the stage in 1967, at the height of flower-power and more importantly for the, admittedly at times light story, the Vietnam War. These hippies are living it high, permanently and fighting the fight against that war, and all it represents. After fifty years, perhaps its relevance wains in that respect, but what we are left with is a kaleidoscopic collection of music and tripping theatre.

There is no denying that Hair is an excellent show, but despite revelling in the original version of this version back in 2016, s…
Read more

Review of Dirty Dancing at Royal & Derngate (Derngate), Northampton

I as a reviewer despise having to write negative reviews, although I suspect many reviewers revel in it, in a weird sort of way. They feel unfair as you know in theory that the performers especially are often just doing what they are told and their very best, well you hope so. Therefore as this tour of the iconic Dirty Dancing travels around the UK, I lay virtually all of the blame of how poor this show is on the director and producer, if that is unfair, I'll take that, but believe me, if you are ever going to, this is a shocker of a show at times.

I was a huge fan of the original film Dirty Dancing in its day, it was a standard little film, nothing award-winning, it just hit a nerve with many people, whether you swooned over Patrick Swayze, or had a crush on Jennifer Grey (hand up here). Baby coming of age through dance with teacher Johnny Castle was iconic cinema, and that is what makes this production so bitter tasting as it rumbles over the characters we grew up loving and ma…
Read more