A Small Mind At The Theatre

In the Balm In Gilead , Bethany Williams, the solo performer in Set It Straight Theatre's Only The Introverted , was a quiet force to be reckoned with, creating a delightfully gentle character within an often cruel and violent world. In Only The Introverted , she explores a world, that I personally am very familiar with, as if anyone ever wished to diagnose me, I think I would be declared an introvert. This whole play from its opening of the emergence out of her shell and to its end is actually just sweetly created. The bursting forth of a million little beeps from a phone is an understandable thing in all of us now, and the response that this introvert character has to this is equally understandable. Even the daily grind of life, travel to, and travel home, from the eyes of someone who may need to live in this world, but doesn't really wish to, is lovingly created. The arrival of then perhaps the crowning glory in Shelly the tortoise is only going to enforce the loving ...

Watching the production of Balm in Gilead sees my entering the fifth year of following the University of Northampton acting students, and what theatre they have provided over the years! Balm in Gilead is no less intriguing than anything that has gone before, written in 1965 by Lanford Wilson, you might think this would be a dated item for the young students to be performing, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Set in a cafe (transposed to England from its original American setting), it sees the lives of addicts, homeless and sex workers converge into a mixture of good but mostly bad moments. My first time in the Maidwell Hall saw an encounter with a brilliantly realised community full of the world of the cafe and the surrounding homes, cardboard boxes and dishevelled beds. As we enter the characters of this world begin living alongside us, addressing us, begging us for money, pushing shopping trolleys around offering off the cuff exchanges with the audience an...