Skip to main content

Review of Flash Festival: eLLite Theatre - Stay at the Looking Glass Theatre

Stay from Leanne Dallman and Lydia Rose Blagg opens with a vast whoosh of activity that on the face of it looks chaotic and disorganised. However no number of strategically placed cards such as the opening few minutes used could ever be disorganised. This has obviously been planned to perfection as one incorrectly picked up card could be most embarrassing. It is an opening of such high energy second only to The Zugzwangs that leaves the audience tired never mind the performers.

This play is all about people who are hybristophiliacs. No me neither. Like I say Flash has offered much education through its shows. A hybristophiliac as I now know is in the most basic sense a woman turned on by violence perpetrated by another. The way Stay explores this is through woman and their emotional connection and sometimes even marriage to men on death row, via the unusually amusing Conjugal Connections website. This is depicted in fifties style pre-recorded adverts with glorious voice overs.

Through the often very physical performance we had a lot of the movement sequences, the beating and rubbing of chest movement, which if I remember correctly was featured in The Odyssey. This provided my only bugbear of the play, as although it was excellent and powerfully performed, I did feel there might have been a touch too much of it during the show.

What I did have absolute regard of though was the strong and totally horrifying sequence featuring Lydia with mask on torturing from afar Leanne's character. This with the perfectly selected music was a creepy, strange and totally vile sequence to view and was the moment of the play for me. The two performers are both excellent and compliment each other well, although Lydia did seem to have the bulk of the material during the piece and had some mighty fine quality accents going on.

A weirdly atmospheric piece of theatre exploring one of the most strange of human disorders, which apparently is also called the Bonnie & Clyde syndrome, and which educates the audience in a vivid and absorbing way.




The Flash Festival 2015 is all over! It ran between 18th-23rd May, 2015 at four venues across the town. Details can be found at http://ftfevents.wix.com/flashtheatre2015, while tickets cannot now be booked via the Royal & Derngate. Details at: http://www.royalandderngate.co.uk/whatson/2015-2016/Other/FlashFestival15

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Murder She Didn't Write at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

Murder She Didn't Write , stopping off for a four-day run at Royal & Derngate on a lengthy UK tour, treads the now well-worn path of an improvisational evening of theatre entertainment. Unsurprisingly, from the title, this show from Degrees of Error's takes a murder mystery as its inspiration, with the story influenced by ideas from the audience each evening. Due to this, Murder She Didn't Write and a review are very much an individual affair. What I saw in my evening at the theatre will differ significantly from what the audience will see the following evening; however, the fine performers will remain. The touring cast, in no particular order, is Lizzy Skrzypiec, Rachael Procter-Lane, Peter Baker, Caitlin Campbell, Stephen Clements, Douglas Walker, Harry Allmark, Rosalind Beeson, Sylvia Bishop, Emily Brady, Alice Lamb, Sara Garrard, Peta Maurice and Matthew Whittle. For my performance, Skrzypiec, Procter-Lane, Baker, Walker, Bishop, and Clements were on stage alongsid...

Review of The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

The Strange Tale of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel is perhaps the perfect antidote to the troubled times we are in, harking back to when things were perhaps simpler and mass media and the press were less in your face. Not to say that bigshot Charlie Chaplin didn't make a name for himself in more than just the movies he made. This though is a warm show, filled with love. This show is based on the very real tale of the 1910 ship heading course for New York, which aboard were Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, unknown, but part of Fred Karno’s music hall troupe, and destined for different, but very major futures. Told by an Idiot's production with Theatre Royal Plymouth (and Royal & Derngate and Unity Theatre) breaks down the tale of the voyage of the SS Cairnrona with intriguingly created flashbacks of the life, generally of Charlie Chaplin. Therefore along the course of the voyage, we see Laurel's moment as understudy to Chaplin, the birth of Chaplin (brilliantly...

Review of The Pillowman at The Playhouse Theatre, Northampton

The Pillowman sounds such a friendly title, and to be fair, his story is one of the lighter aspects of Martin McDonagh's script. It still involves dead children though, if you want to get a clear vision of how dark this play is. Set in a police state of the future, Katurian (Toby Pugh) is taken in for the content of his often violent stories and a similarity to a spate of recent child killings. Here in detention cell 13, his police captors, Tupolski (Adrian Wyman) and Ariel (Steve While) play good cop, bad cop while holding over the threat of violence against Katurian's mentally disabled brother Michal (Patrick Morgan), being held in another cell. The Pillowman is clearly a very warped story, with the blackest of black comedy, and often also very offensive with it's racial stereotyping and disability. In fact, it is no surprise that a couple left in the interval, as I would happily admit that this play is far from everyone. I like a good black comedy though, and ...