A Small Mind At The Theatre

For the second year running, I was honoured to be invited to the Graduate Showcase in the heart of London, at which this years BA Actors made their final appearance together. These were the third group that I have been able to follow to the end, and the group I had spent the longest following, so it was emosh for all of us. Our venue this year was the Tristan Bates Theatre within The Actors Centre at Covent Garden. I have to admit that personally I wasn't particularly struck on the venue, the studio space was a little dingy and a tad strong on the echo. However venue is second, the talent at it was key, and like previous years this group have been of a tremendous standard. This year the format of the showcase, under director Simon Cole, had been tweaked a little and the snippets of the actors Flash pieces had been dispensed with in favour of longer pieces from seventeen plays. This year I had actually seen two of the plays featured; Citizenship this year at Connections, and Rai...

The Graduate Showcase was pretty exciting even for me, so heaven knows how it was for the actors actually taking part. Here I was in a gathering of around twenty people (all others infinitely more important than me) at a special closed event at a West End theatre, complete with free drinks and buffet. Fortunately I had Mr Jim aka @mudbeast76 to keep me on the straight and narrow of juices after the one alcoholic one went straight to the head drink. Then as if it wasn't a surreal world as it was, there only goes and walks in Lukewarm himself, Christopher Biggins! However, this isn't about me, this is about the thirty six ultra talented individuals who after I have followed them for a bit over a year are about to venture forth into the big competitive world of the acting community. They have though the double advantage of not only coming through the excellent three years University Of Northampton training and also being rather talented to help them in this. This being my firs...