A Small Mind At The Theatre

It was birthday time at the NN Cafe as Feast of Fools became a year old. A relatively small (guys come to open mics they are great), but enthusiastic crowd were present to see the eight performers on the evening. Our host for the first half was Richard York who welcomed us to the evening with a none too offensive blast on his bagpipes before spiraling into a number of thanks for those who made the first year such a success. After this he gave a tale of a bag filled with torn up tales. It was all great fun to get the evening going. This was promptly followed by two lovely songs from Theresa Kelleher, the second of which was especially quite amazing. For birthday night we had just the one new performer, however what a new performer. Lynette Hill gave us a quite magical tale of her gran's adventures with her ducks, Cuff and Link. Funny, uplifting and endlessly entertaining. It was quite a debut. We needed a great star to follow that. We got Dave Blake. I have to say I frequently...

After two months of open mic nights, the Feast of Fools returned to a special guest night with Belfast Londoner Eamonn Keenan. However first up we were treated to a slight open mic night for a half hour warm up from familiar and in one case unfamiliar performers. Opening the evening once again was the music of Richard York, this time again joined by Elizabeth York on the harp (which was to be used a little later in the evening as well to storytelling perfection). Richard York was also our host of the evening and gave us a comic and perfectly sneaky short tail of a shepherds sheep being missing. The perfect punchline that went down well with the assembled audience, even if I am sure the sheep wasn't impressed. Our next teller was the new performer for the evening, her name Anne-Marie Sandos. A playful teller and as she informed us, usually a teller to children. So we were given big and bold telling painted with vast broad strokes, much like Feast regular Lisa Shepherd (and inde...