A Small Mind At The Theatre

Bryony Lavery's More Light , presented here in London as the final group performance by the 2019 BA Actors of the University of Northampton, is one of the more stranger plays that you might have the opportunity to see. Also despite is strangeness, it is also alarmingly entertaining as well. Although even now, I'm not entirely sure why. Their Emporer is dead, and these ladies who served him have found themselves confined against their will with his body. However, these ladies do not wish to die, but how to survive? They must eat of course, and sealed in a tomb to the great Emporer, what is the only thing that they can eat? One guess. It was as I came to write this review that I discovered that actually More Light was originally commissioned as a National Theatre Connections play, and on this revelation, all suddenly made sense. It's an accessible piece, ridiculously odd, but totally accessible, even though you might not understand it all. It also has a very large ense...

Concluding my 2019 Flash Festival week saw a journey to The Deco Theatre as Not Aloud Ensemble went it alone to present Leviticus. This tale of four individuals waiting in perhaps the best place to do so, a waiting room, was one of the more stirring and interesting Flash shows of the week. This waiting room though, it didn't take long to work out (even beyond the title clue), was God's waiting room, where these four were waiting for the decision of where they were headed. Here we had sulky nineties firestarter teen played by Samantha Turner, an ultra glamourous American from the 30s/40s played by Bethany Ray, a quiet and generally boring cleric played by Bethan Medi, and then finally the initially silent, but emotionally charged delivery man played by Thomas van Langenberg. It is a sparky quartet that creates the perfect powderkeg of conflict, as times clash to create issues surrounding gender, equality and ignorance. Perhaps Ray is the best, purely because she is often...