A Small Mind At The Theatre

Let's all laugh hysterically at dementia! That is the winning principle behind Blue Shift Theatre's Deciding What To Do With Dad , with black comedy of the highest order, they create one of the best Flash shows I have seen. However, before you think we are talking cruel humour, this is far from it, it is understanding very clearly of the situation, and is far from nasty in its writing. It can be expressive certainly, we get plenty of poo references, and it isn't a play you would take granny to. In fact, it starts rather wonderfully, breaking the fourth wall and a reading of a disclaimer, that is in itself, more offensive than many plays. The playing to the audience is truly brilliant in this and creates much humour as a result, and the cast is clearly both in their element and comfortable in this. Jac Burbidge, Jake Statham and Hal Gallagher play three brothers, one sensible and rational, one who has been a wandering, and one a clown, literally. They are an immense tr...

Going into seeing Accused , the first devised show by this years third year BA Actors graduates, I have to confess I shamefully knew nothing of its influence, Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol . However, it wasn't a great leap for me to identify that the piece gorgeously sung by the whole cast at the end of this really imaginative piece, was indeed part of the Ballad itself. The Ballad it turns out, written by Wilde during exile following release from Reading tells of the execution of a man called Wooldridge, a man hung for cutting the throat of his wife. In Accused , we have another prisoner, destined to hang, but cleverly for what remains to its end, an unknown crime. It's bad, pretty bad, clear from the reaction of both prisoner and guards alike, and the Accused's life is generally in danger a great deal, long before the Executioner (played extremely nicely by Georgi McKie) comes to do her bidding. Playing the Accused, and really rather brilliantly, is A...

Following the prim and proper telling of Cinderella performed by the latest batch of third years in front of a theatre of under tens the day before, the next day we were hit with Anthony Neilson's very different The Night Before Christmas . Dispensing of Cinderella's Mutt and Jeff, we found ourselves witnessing e(l)ffing and jeffing as this adult panto was performed by a quartet of students. This was my first experience of an adult panto, also here described as an anti-panto, with good reason. Between the added swearing, this short and snappy play, barely thirty minutes, attempts to destroy any spirit of Christmas, even going as far as to suggest that the "spirit" is actually a drug peddled by Father Christmas and his army of Elf helpers, cocaine-like spirit in fact, where perhaps even the elves shoot up for the buzz. As this play opens, we are in a shady, dodgy warehouse, full of potentially illicit goods (which also conveniently provides many of the local con...