A Small Mind At The Theatre

For the third year running, I had the pleasure of being allowed to see another batch of talented actors strut their stuff on a London stage in front of the agents and directors of the acting world. This is always a key and very final moment of the course, and at no point will these people perform together again (although wouldn't that be neat to have performance reunions in years to come!). There is little point in my going into too much detail again over the performers really as I have done this elsewhere in my final review ( click me! ). However, the show under the direction of Simon Cole was a neat "showcase" of their talents once again, whipping between scenes featuring duos or trios glued together by swift scene changes. It really was a seize the moment as the actors never got very long to prove themselves. The format (and some of the content) was the same as last year, and a couple of my picks were Diary of a Madman featuring two superb comic moments from Karr ...

Even with a few shows to go in the Flash week this year, I felt that with Broken , I had seen the best that the festival was going to offer. Looking back now, it was and perhaps it is, combined together with performance, visual style, tech, and intriguing storytelling, one of the very best Flash shows I have seen. Ben Hampton I have seen the split personality line before at Flash, however not quite like this case, multiple ones and so many different layers to the same person. Our character is Billy Milligan, accused of crimes that he has no knowledge of. As we follow the play we learn that he is suffering from this mental illness of 24 different personalities, one of which is the perpetrator of the crimes. We are introduced to just a few of these in this performance, we have the six-year-old child (Victoria Rowlands), a constantly dour sulking woman (Rachel Brown), an American (Liam Faik) and an aggressive confident young lady (Becky Fowler). Then there is Ben H...

It is perhaps quite a bit of a review spoiler if I open on the comment that I went to see Vinegar Tom by Caryl Churchill a second time. It must mean that it was good then and this review will only end well, unlike for some of the plays characters? In all honesty, it was more superb than good and I probably would have watched it a third time given the chance. However, it didn't all start well as I think for the first few minutes or so I still had in my mind that I might not like it. The blame for this lies I think with my previous horrific encounter with the work of Churchill and the excruciating Here We Go , officially the worst play I have seen. However, time told very quickly that this play was not in that league. It opens with a meeting between Alice (Helena Fenton) and "Man" (Benjamin Hampton in the first of several roles) and is gorgeously performed by the two, with Helena in particular with the most perfectly gorgeous dialect. It is a stark powerful opening to ...