A Small Mind At The Theatre

The National Theatre Connections festival has become one of my favourite theatre events of the year and as each year has passed I have attempted to get to see more each time. 2014 I saw just the four, last year it was upped to ten, this year I had the pleasure of seeing twelve shows in four days. I pretty much loved everyone (with a couple of glaring exceptions). Last year a last minute decision saw me see one play a second time by a different group, and it was interesting to see the subtle differences in the pieces while maintaining exactly the same play. This year I was able to increase this and see four plays twice, and the difference on two of them was quite amazing and made this years festival a quite stunning eye opening theatre experience of a new kind. In order to get a grip over attempting to review twelve separate plays, I have decided to review the plays in the order I saw them, except the plays I saw performed twice. For those I will attempt to compare and contrast, and a...

Over the last couple of years the National Theatre Connections plays have become quite a favourite of mine. They are short snappy forty to fifty minute plays by often well known writers and are designed purely to be performed by youth theatres. This year locally there are to be 21 youth theatre performances of the twelve plays for 2016. The location venue for this batch will Royal & Derngate at the end of April and just into May and I myself shall do my very best to see as many as possible. However on Saturday I had the pleasure of seeing the very first preview of Gargantua by Carl Grose by the Looking Glass Theatre in their wonderful performance venue of St Peters Church. Last year I happened to see another piece by Grose entitled Stay Brave, Brian Gravy, which was a tremendously challenging piece for the even younger performers. This was to be quite a bit different. The performance itself was very much in its early days with an acknowledged number of issues (not least som...