A Small Mind At The Theatre

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 ...

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 ...

Regular readers of this fair blog will be aware that I am not overly keen on pantomimes, although I always at this time of year end up inexplicably in the vicinity of more than one (and this year I am destined for six I believe!). So, despite Dracula (or A Pain in the Neck) , not officially being billed as a panto, that is very much the vibe of this Playhouse Theatre adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic. A company of actors (well, aristocrats) in the 1920s have assembled to put on a little show, their own version of Dracula (or something like Harker of Whitby meets the Count) for us, the "willing" audience. Our host is Sir Simon Smee (Simon Rye) who will play Jonathan Harker during this little performance. What follows is for the best part a slightly loose version of the Stoker classic, which does definitely at times get a little complicated in the way it tells the story, not made easier by the playing of characters playing characters explanation. However, this is, be...

There have been a couple of television versions of the Mapp & Lucia novels by E. F. Benson over the years and irrespective of which generation version you might have seen, the roles of Miss Mapp and Mrs. Lucas were filled with some heavyweight performers. So taking on these roles could, in theory, be a challenge too much to live up to. However, that would be if the characters themselves were less the sum of the performer. These are great characters on paper as well as on stage and therefore Gena McCrystal (Miss Mapp) and Juliet O'Connor (Lucia) make them very much their own in the stage adaption by John Van Druten. Lucia has arrived and breezed both into the town of Tilling and the musical chair roundabout of house rental that is want to occur here. Her rented property is Miss Mapp's and for some reason, Mapp fails to follow the routine of keeping away, constantly "popping in", so the battle lines are drawn. Make Way for Lucia is the typical battle of suprem...

"They Came From Mars and landed outside the Farndale Avenue Church in time for the townswomen's guild's coffee morning" is probably the longest play title out there and currently I reckon the strangest play that I have seen. Having said that and with no prior knowledge of what the play entailed, it turned out that it was much more familiar to me than I first thought. Written by David McGillivray and Walter J Zerlin Jnr, They Came From Mars is part of a series of plays otherwise known as Farndale Avenue. They centre around a women's guild attempts of producing a play despite a general lack of everything including sets, props, abilities to act and men. Not long into the play and after a gloriously entertaining audience participation introduction from Mrs Reece (Adrian Wyman) it slowly became clear to me that I had seen many of the ideas before. It is true that Mischief Theatre through their two Goes Wrong plays have refined a failed production to both timing a...

It is safe to say that the sitcom Allo Allo was very much a product of its time and if you didn't live through it and sat through the play being performed by St Albans Charity Players this week, you may well wonder what the hell was going on. I lived through Allo Allo and I have to say I enjoyed the slapstick pointless antics of a style of sitcom that probably no longer exists (some would say "Thank God"). Its silly, often risque comedy was very much of its time, but during the eighties there was a lot of it about. Thanks to writers like Jeremy Lloyd, David Croft and Jimmy Perry. It was all good clean (but with hidden meanings) fun. The stage play is a bit like a greatest hits with a loose plot, concerning a visit by Hitler and that famous painting. Written by the original writers the play takes place across seven different locations (mostly within Rene's cafe) which were cleverly realised in such a small area at the front of the hall. Individually lit to direct o...