A Small Mind At The Theatre

It is safe to say that there have been a lot of Agatha Christie spoofs kicking around over the years, they are ripe material to plunder, and often feeling as if the original author was even sending them up at times as well. So, to discover another one on stage at The Core Theatre in Corby is no surprise. New Old Fiends' Crimes Under the Sun is a patch above many of them, a speedy, witty and genuinely ingenious take on a Poirot influenced case (no prizes for guessing Evil Under the Sun). As our lead, we have a curiously Belgian detective Artemis Arinae, Poirot in all but name, and more specifically gender (it's the first thing I noticed about her, to steal a joke). The show opens relatively badly, with a rather long introduction from our detective played by Jill Myers. It is the only downside of the evening, as once the stage is full of the quite brilliant collection of characters, this show whips along with an amazing intensity. The characters created in Crimes Under the ...

Two years ago this week, I saw for the first time the older faction of the Royal & Derngate Youth Theatre perform Sweeney Todd (I had seen one month before the younger part create the delightful Honk!). While a quite brilliant level of standard has continued in their productions since, nothing has quite reached that optimum point of Sweeney for me. Oliver! is their latest production and this epic scale show merges all of the age groups together to create a spellbinding piece of youthful and lively theatre that is rightfully packing the auditorium like no R&D youth show before. I have to say straight up that Oliver! does not beat the legend that is Sweeney for me, however it comes as close as we have ever been to doing so. A lot of this perhaps is down to my personal taste and Sweeney's two stunning leads, which have yet to be bettered. The macabre nature of Sweeney also gelled with me and Lionel Bart's tale, despite being packed with more known tunes than seems possib...

The cover note for the script of Oladipo Agboluaje's Immune describes it as "a challenging science fiction play with a large cast", and the word challenging in this case is not a lie. This is a fast paced, multi-cast changing script which leaves little room for error for its young cast in the performance. If the script isn't enough to handle for the young performers, director Christopher Elmer-Gorry and designer Carl Davies have made the situation even more complex for the actors with the set and stage work. Having to manhandle great panels on wheels and a huge cube, which also splits in two occasionally, during scene changes requires skill, coordination and cooperation of a high level. As if all this is not enough, the actual story is epic enough for the relatively small stage of the Royal. Attempting to form an apocalyptic world (albeit only happening in Plymouth) offers challenges in itself, but Agboluaje's script does that in a sort of apocalypse in the teac...