A Small Mind At The Theatre

The Third Year BA Acting & Creative Practice students made their final appearance onstage together in an adaptation of Jekyll & Hyde by Royal & Derngate's Erica Martin, who directs with Trudy A Bell. It offered an inventive, if perhaps overlong, telling of the story, but allowed the diverse range of skills from the students to be fully exploited. This telling of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, might at times feel a little different to those that know the story well. The piece itself, while in keeping with the Jekyll tale of a scientist exploring a hidden self, also developed a separate story, involving another culprit for Hyde's deadly adventures. This revolved around a local piece of history relating to the 1892 murder of Annie Pritchard (Amy Catherine), and the person convicted of her murder, an Andrew McCrae (Ben Loftus). It's a neat spin on fleshing out the tale, especially to allow more depth for the 23 strong year group to all be part of. So...

Aficionados of Shakespeare would probably recoil at "The Story" on the back of the programme for the BA Acting & Creative Practice second-year students production of the Bard's comedy Much Ado About Nothing . In short, it refers to Don Pedro returning with his regiment from the Falklands, and stopping off at Leonato's hotel in Greenland on the way. Elsewhere Don Pedro's brother Don Jon is on the lookout for juicy stories for the tabloid newspaper he edits. Claudia has fallen in love with Hero, Benedict says he never will fall in love. Meanwhile, the Sirius Arctic Dog Patrol keeps things in line and Balthasar with her trusty guitar keeps the music rolling. Yes, this is 1982, and we are in a world of a very different Much Ado About Nothing , and oddly it mostly seems to work. As expected there are some great performances, even at this second-year stage. There is great style and much more period feel to the ladies in the play than the gents, so Beatrice (Li...

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 ...

It is safe to say I think that reviewer and show maker alike never set out to deliberately write a bad review or create a bad show. There is simply no logic in it really for the latter, I mean why would you? However when the latter occurs and the former is there in the audience, things will end badly, and for me, it gives me no enjoyment. For my penultimate show, Unveiled , at this year's University of Northampton Fringe Festival, Myriad Theatre performer Isabella Hunt explores what marriage means to her in what ends up being just 18 minutes of a show that sadly goes nowhere. Marriage to Hunt it seems involves intermittently putting on and taking off a succession of dresses, amongst a collection of anguished thoughts mostly that mainly involves an outrageously over repeated physical piece. There is some very brief interaction with the audience among the lines of "how many of you are married?" and other light thoughts, where the answers are written onto a dress, the ...

I have always been a fan of a little science fiction. Not those sprawling space operas, or complicated detailed tales though, that you feel the need for a science degree to battle through. I am more about a simple tale, well told, not packed with scientific lingo, just well told. With Godspeed from performer Fox Neal and his Far From Home company, he ticks all the boxes on the good tale, well told, checklist. Ishmael Constant is humanity's last hope and following a comprehensive training, and having survived a troubling childhood, he is ready to embark on a twelve-year journey to a hole in spacetime to see if beyond it there is any hope for the people of Earth. Godspeed is an extremely well-written tale, told through Ismael's initial agreement and through his journey and told in chapters, and most impressively interspersed with some brilliant flashbacks, indicated via the screen in brilliantly realised video flashing between Space/War/Home, it's an incredibly good id...

One of my favourite films is the 2014 Whiplash , it revolves around drums (one of my favourite and often disregarded instruments) and jazz (one of my guilty pleasures, the Marmite of music indeed). Can't Quite Hit It takes drums as it's theme, and at times has a little of that film about it as well. Maybe it is therefore not a total surprise that it ended up being my favourite show of the Fringe week, and one of the top University shows I have seen over six years. Bias doesn't come into it though, as performer Rosemarie Sheach has created a top-notch show from her Rumble Theatre Company, superbly and endearingly performed, that non-drum fans I am sure would enjoy as well. It's more a chasing your dream story as Leah, an aspiring drummer, seeks out fame and more importantly the ability to do for a career what you love, and not have to be a team leader at KFC instead. You could replace drummer for any number of things to make everyone in the audience feel the passion...

Performer Jessica Harding opens her Unseen Truths production Exposing Inequality with a direct monologue to the audience where she explains that this is a show about, unsurprising, inequality, much centring around that vital turning point, the Suffragette movement. In this opening piece, she says something along the lines of this isn't just another boring show about this subject, and her intention is to make it all the more different. It is a dangerous thing to promise something like this, as it sets out all sorts of hopes for an excellent show. Sadly this genuinely entertaining opening, spirited and enthusiastic delivery from Harding, is pretty much the best part of the show. Although, Exposing Inequality is far from no merits at all, as there are some excellent ideas here which just needed a little more refining to make them work. The bulk of this show centres around Leicester Suffragette Alice Hawkins and takes her job in a shoe factory as another idea for the play. Throug...

42 Church Lane from Battered Lemon Theatre Company was the sharpest written story of the week at the Fringe, a brightly clever tale of three groups occupants of the titular address. It's also lovingly performed, and despite the longest show of the week, never boring or outstaying it's welcome. We meet our first occupants of the address in 1941, as the resident family welcome home Arthur from the war, returning due to injury. Flash forward to 2016, and Megan and Jamie have moved into their first house together. Finally, 2027 sees its occupant Doctor Mia opening a clinic to administer the MMR vaccine in the face of the newly privatised NHS. Each of these three worlds is, in theory, unconnected, but as storylines develope through a strong and totally coherent scene-switching way, it becomes clear that the underlying theme is very much that of trust, and in the end, the betrayal of it. Each of the performers has multiple characters and they often switch briskly, but there ...

If victory and success at Fringe came from the atmosphere alone, Samuel Gellard and his show Paris La Nuit from his Nostalgia Theatre Company would have probably won the week before the show began. Deep in the cellars of Hazelrigg House, the very oozing essence of a wartime bar in Paris drips from the walls and festers around. We sit cabaret style, around tables strewn with traditional paraphernalia, photos, notes and coinage, and another sits at a stall propping up the bar, ready for an impromptu game of cards with our host. Never has that cellar been better dressed for a play before, and it might be cramped, and you might have hit your head getting down there, but boy was it worth it. Jean Clement is our host, happy to entertain, get us inebriated and plays us cool jazz while he does so. It's a masterful performance from Gellard, just becoming the man, cooly leaning smoking his cigarette as we assemble in our chairs and never dropping the role from then on it. Upon war b...

It is sadly true that even back in the '90s when I was about the right age to do so, I wasn't one for busting the moves on the dance floor. Therefore when I received the advance email for this show that we were requested to wear black, bring I.D. and come to paaaartey at The Platform, I welcomed it with a lot of trepidation. However, I need not have worried too much as I left most of the moving to the other students in the audience and my esteemed blogging colleague Mr Chrisparkle , who attempted some moves of his own and looked far more the part. I Believe from OVM - Our Voices Matter is performed by Na-Keisha Glenn in two main roles, and ably assisted by a number of other actors including Rosemarie Sheach mixing on the deck as the brilliantly introduced "token white girl". It tells the story of an innocent wannabee singer from Leicester and her pursuit to make it big from a meeting with R. Kelly, who inexplicably, is coming to Northampton. It doesn't take...

Having seen in excess of 70 University shows through Flash and this new breed, the Fringe, I have to say that I have enjoyed enough of all but one of them, to make them worthwhile, and to judge them a success, even if just one for ambition. Mein Hodenkrebs from Light in the Dark Theatre Company is a struggle though, but it does show immense promise at times, but unfortunately, that is mostly all on the big screen. Mein Hodenkrebs means My Testicular Cancer and is a comedy set in the body of Zak, a student whose world turns upside down with the news that cancer is riddling his body. That cancer here manifests itself in this play in a series of bizarre attempts to create political satire as characters like Boris and Theresa battle it out in Zak's body. Some of it works, the rectum scene, for instance, most of it feels hard work to watch, and irrelevant to the show. Our performers. Ben Loftus, David Wallace, Giacomo Galbiati and Kyle Lawson are good enough, throwing themselves i...

Back in the eighties, I used to read quite a lot of Choose Your Adventure books from the likes of Livingstone and Jackson, so, I was vaguely aware of the health, agility and whatever points as I came to this intriguing, and genuinely extremely different, Fringe Festival performance. The difference here from those books was this used the action and live a competitive diced variety of play, and this you have to think a little more on your feet and quicker at than sitting in bed reading. However, I was surrounded by non-experts anyway, so, as I took my Dragonborn form into the basement of The Platform, with helmet fitting badly over my glasses and on my giant, mostly empty head, I and the others relied on our guardian like guide (think Treguard but friendlier, for those old enough to get the reference), Liam Bottazzi. He is a jovial chap, all willing to guide us, but also as the gamesmaster, kill us if we step out of line. Our assembled gang decided in our path to steal a crystal ...

The Fringe Festival programme informed me that Veto Ensemble's Eve is based upon the biblical tale The Legend of Lilith. However, as someone who has only touched a bible since RE at school to move it in a drawer of a hotel, I'm afraid the reference is lost on me. However, a quick Google tells that Lilith is a wilderness demon and/or the first wife of Adam. So, taking the title Eve into account, I'll accept the latter reference as relevant here, because even a heathen like me recognises the relation between Eve and Adam. However, actually, none of this matters really to enjoy Eve, as this is basically a tale of friendship told in 90s flashback and modern times and its theme of dealing with both broken friendship, misogynistic society and rape. Eve therefore clearly tackles the tough subject matter, however, it has a lightness of touch to never be uncomfortable, but making its theme clear. It helps that it has two special performers, and at times very different on...

For my second show of the 2019 University of Northampton Fringe Festival, it was a head-first dive into mental health (and this was not going to be the only show exploring themes on this during Fringe), and Amy DaCosta's Welcome to my World from her company The Realistic Theatre Company. This particular take on mental health was exploring Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was not one I was aware of going into the show. However, over thirty minutes, DeCosta went some way in helping a little to understand this, it is as it turns out multiple personality disorder, and here DaCosta explores a woman that has several hidden people while embracing as much as possible her real one of Zsofia. Welcome to my World is at times, and maybe deliberately so, a little confusing. As the characters become dominant, while DaCosta's characterisation is very different, the stories they tell can take some following, and indeed a discussion after was the only way to get a grip on certain a...

The opening show of the 2019 Fringe Festival (dissertation performances for (BA) Acting and Creative Practice Students) was everything as bold as its predecessors in 2018. During its first year, the Fringe established an audacity to its shows immediately and with Clickbait it was already very good to be back at the festival. Clickbait is presented by Flashdrive Theatre, made up of performers Shona Bullas and George Henry, and from the outset of the two performers standing in their underwear, we knew this was going to be bold, brave and indeed painful (for them) theatre. Henry plays Luke and Bullas is Emma, and both run YouTube channels, Luke-ing Good and Emmazing , and while they have some individual success, they seek, like all in this area, more. After a meeting, they create crossover videos on each other's channels and a partnership is quickly formed into a dual channel, LukeandEmma (it rolls off the tongue better, Luke says). What surprises with Clickbait is how ...