A Small Mind At The Theatre

Hot of the heels of bringing Alan Bennett's The History Boys vibrantly back to the stage, director Gary Amos returns with his newly created theatre company, Illusion Production and a very different version of Enda Walsh's Chatroom than many would be familiar with. Chatroom is as standard, a relatively static play to handle directorially, formed of conversations online from your typical caricatured people that might lurk on them. So, to create some drama into proceedings, Gary Amos has taken the decision to totally destroy the concept of the original play and bring all the characters together in a dead end club. If destroying the whole original premise sounds drastic, perhaps it's because in theory it is, and I did have more than a minor concern about it as I sat in the theatre watching. However, this production gets away with it by the sheer bravado of the scenes it creates because of it's reckless disregard of proper form. It's a tough play to watch, mixing

Remarkable as it may seem when I settled, although a little sweatily into my seat at The Playhouse Theatre to watch The History Boys , I was about to have only my second encounter with the works of Alan Bennett. My only previous meeting with his material had been the 1994 film The Madness of King George . Set in a Sheffield grammar school in the 1980's, The History Boys brings to life the story of the pursuit to Oxford of eight students and the school's collection of wacky and genital cupping teachers. It's a bewildering piece to stage with its pre-interval 18 scenes and another bag of 15 afterwards, however, this snappy production under the direction of Gary Amos moves without pause for breath, and perhaps despite my never thinking I would ever write this, maybe at times too swift scene changes. For a person whose musical tastes lie very much in the eighties soundtrack this play utilises, bridging every single scene with classics from the decade falls right into my happ