A Small Mind At The Theatre

The third and final of the three plays presented by the third year University of Northampton BA Actors was wacky with a capital W interpretation of the already crazy Carlo Goldoni play A Servant to Two Masters . This play is very much more familiar to modern audiences in the guise of Richard Bean's extremely successful reworking One Man, Two Guvnors' , but here Lee Hall's slightly more traditional set version is given a box of frogs working over by director Frank Wurzinger. I have to be honest, this entire setup should have been so good, many of the cast had worked so well in other roles of similar style, outrageous comedy, playing to the audience, many were clearly so adept at this from their previous shows. So, why did A Servant To Masters fall down so badly? I think, for me, one word sums it up, control. The craziness is not controlled, the cast appears to be often just having too much fun themselves, which doesn't translate the audience (well this one anyway)...

There is no denying that Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a classic and well-regarded play and that in the hands of the always brilliant University of Northampton BA Actors, it should have been a thrill of innovation and epic theatre. So, why, when there was so much talent, did it become just an uninspired, by the numbers production? I had only seen the play, formed around the 1690s Salem Witch Trials, once before in a vibrant school production that, while clearly long and drawn out (it's a heck of a long play in this, it's pure form), always remained entertaining, especially being performed by that young and enthusiastic cast. Here in this version directed by Nadia Papachronopoulou, it should have been so, so good, with the actor's talent, the potential for a dramatic stage version crackling with inspired moments was so overwhelming. So why did with end up with just a static, curiously soulless affair? In principle it does nothing wrong, performances are strong,...

The final year performances of BA Actors this year upped sticks and headed away from their Northampton Royal territory and gathered to show their skills in London. The first of the three shows being performed was Dennis Kelly's DNA, a play which I saw performed on the Royal stage itself four years ago. I enjoyed it for its dark mysterious nature and was looking forward to seeing a different interpretation of the show. It tells the tale of a group of youngsters who do something really bad, and proceed to attempt to cover it up, resulting in the real bad, well, getting more bad. It's dark yes, but also, very funny at times. It opens with a looming movement piece of theatre, which I always love and this was no different for me, brooding and sinister. It's quite a long opening, which perhaps, in the end, becomes too long, but it's a fabulous piece of theatre for me. It set's the scene very well for Kelly's dark piece to unfold and in the hands of these, about ...

While some issue plays tend to miss the point of providing fun and entertainment as well as making their point on a relevant issue, FEET is certainly not one of them. Written, produced, directed and performed by the two-person team of Emma And Lawrence Wrote A Play, this is clearly a labour of love of the two, full names Emma Brown and Lawrence Smith, it is fun and engaging throughout. It's "issue" is loosely about selling your body for money or art and how far you might be willing to push it. Lucy Winwood (Emma Brown) is your typical young actress, struggling hard to get those money making roles, or roles in general, and in need of money she stumbles upon the world of feet fetishism (as you, of course, would) and slowly from just images of her feet sold online, it becomes feet in jelly and then finally personal meetings with clients for full on feet interaction. The path that FEET takes is that is this denigration of your body in selling your feet actually worse than...

It is perhaps worth going to the theatre to be educated as much as be entertained, and the Fringe like my home grew Flash Festival seem to have a lean towards plays wishing to make a point. The Invisible Condition from Last Word Theatre is very much one of those, its theme is mental health, and perhaps more specifically the NHS approach to it. The play itself offers us to a certain extent the two sides of treatment, we have the psychologist (Anna Demetriuo) trying to deal with a problem through observation and discussion, and then we have the psychiatrist (James Pearse) who goes by the solution of throwing tablets at the patient. While the whole piece is very worthy and putting over a tremendously important subject, The Invisible Problem gets bogged down in too many facts and ends up being more a series of case studies than a piece of theatre. This influx of data leaves it difficult for the audience to ever create much of an emotional connection with the numerous characters that the...

For the third year running, I had the pleasure of being allowed to see another batch of talented actors strut their stuff on a London stage in front of the agents and directors of the acting world. This is always a key and very final moment of the course, and at no point will these people perform together again (although wouldn't that be neat to have performance reunions in years to come!). There is little point in my going into too much detail again over the performers really as I have done this elsewhere in my final review ( click me! ). However, the show under the direction of Simon Cole was a neat "showcase" of their talents once again, whipping between scenes featuring duos or trios glued together by swift scene changes. It really was a seize the moment as the actors never got very long to prove themselves. The format (and some of the content) was the same as last year, and a couple of my picks were Diary of a Madman featuring two superb comic moments from Karr ...

I have seen a lot of talent pass through the University of Northampton BA Actors course over the three years that I have now followed them and have happily followed their individual striving to make it in the packed world of theatre beyond training. It is especially lovely personally to be remembered, like I was by Lost Fragments Productions for having been there in their early days and be invited three years later to see four of those performers take to a London stage. Sorry I Killed Your Cat is written by and stars one of those students, Tré Curran, and also stars graduates from Northampton, Liam Harvey, Katie Hartshorne and Annie Jones. It is a farcical in the extreme take on the classic dinner party scenario. Take Abigail's Party perhaps and bring it into the modern age and add what is a little bit of more fruity adult themes and you have this plays basic premise. The characters are all relatively well defined and to a certain extent, ones with solid but heavy stereotypes...

One of the greatest theatre travesty's for 2015 for me was the spectacularly brilliant Anything Goes ending its tour early, despite a company of exceptional talent delivering an incredibly entertaining show it closed four months early. Sadly after watching Show Boat in London this week, I have probably found this years theatre travesty. Yet another show from the obvious talent of production that is Sheffield Theatres is destined for early closure, again by four months, a cruel pattern. True it will have had four months run in London when it finishes, however a production as brilliant as this deserves to run and run. There is some suggestion that part of Show Boat's early closure is the fact that it doesn't have a "star" in its line-up. In this "star" wording, we are looking at those from television delights like the soaps or X-Factor that would bring the people in their droves, apparently. However Show Boat does have in my opinion far better stars, thi...

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...

It must take some doing to make people leave before the end of a forty minute play, however Caryl Churchill's Here We Go managed to achieve this, and it wasn't just one, several left. I wasn't of course one of them as I have made it my decision to never leave under pain of not being able to review. However I could understand why as Churchill's play descends from promise and well written material into no writing and painful viewing. The play itself is three small parts forming the funeral wake, the afterlife and the end of life period of an unnamed "Old Man" played with actual style by Patrick Godfrey. Not that he gets much opportunity to show his performance skills, as he doesn't appear in the first ten minutes and has no lines for the last twenty. It is as I say all very odd. The first part is the best and actually entertaining with an impressive cast of seven gathering at the old mans wake and exchanging clever and witty dialogue in a wonderfully swi...

The 39 Steps by John Buchan is to many a remarkably familiar tale. Even if you haven't read the relatively slight book, you will almost certainly have seen one of the numerous versions of the tale Whether your Richard Hannay was Robert Donat's 1935 version or Rupert Penry-Jones' version in 2008 or somewhere in between, a play perhaps needed to do something different. Patrick Barlow's version at the Criterion sure does something different and nine years after its debut at the theatre is still packing them in, my Tuesday viewing left little room for many more patrons. It is however soon to end though as the Laurence Olivier and double Tony Award winner is to finish in September. The play by Barlow is adapted from an original concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon which was first performed in Richmond, North Yorkshire in 1995. That concept is for a no holds barred physical comedy version of the spy story with the clever idea of just four actors playing all of the part...

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...

While I had seen several theatre musicals this year at the local Royal & Derngate, I had yet to experience the full London effect until I settled down in my seat at the Apollo to watch Urinetown. I had grown to like musicals more this year after my first live one Blood Brothers in March and finally decided to make the effort in the big city. Also despite publicity and negative comments regarding the title Urinetown, this made it appeal to me slightly more to my bizarre mind. I am glad I did, what I witnessed was two glorious hours of fun, frolics, dark (very dark) humour, blood, dance and some singing as well. It is a musical. On arrival in the theatre the set from Soutra Gilmour cuts an imposing, perfect dystopian figure. Tough steel work, dull and grim, perfect. Before the show begins the creepy Officer Lockstock (Jonathan Slinger) starts to prowl the stage and is soon joined by Little Sal (understudy Katie Bernstein on my evening). As the show begins these two break the fourth...

Ever since the announcement of Speed The Plow and its stage débutante star and wild child Lindsay Lohan, the internet and press were as wild as her with comments about the likely disaster than the production was to become. I saw comments ranging from her not knowing lines, to her walking away from the show and the comment that her understudy was likely to perform more than her. I have no interest in naysayers generally and would rather form an opinion myself really and have not kept tabs on her commenter's much since the début. However a whole paragraph on Miss Lohan from me is ironic really as I didn't attend Speed The Plow to see her as I was here for the opportunity to see Richard Schiff on stage. The West Wing is probably my favourite TV series and I was never going to miss a chance to see Toby Ziegler in action live. He is not a disappointment for me and issues forth David Mamet's wordy script in all the fast paced manner I am familiar with from the aforementioned te...

A play has to be doing something right if you go to see it three times, the third of which involves travelling to London to do so. Either its superb, or this viewer is a little weird. Fortunately we have the situation where both of those statements are correct. The Play That Goes Wrong  is nothing short of one of the funniest plays, indeed anything you could ever wish to see. Having seen it twice in Northampton in two days, the opportunity to see it in the big city and its new home (maybe for sometime to come?) at the Duchess Theatre was too much to miss. With its new home in the capital came an added confidence from the show. If anything it felt more solid, funnier, and more polished. It certainly hadn't settled on its laurels of its huge touring success. There were a selection of added jokes, slightly bolder staging moments and a slightly increased interplay with the hysterical audience. I have had the pleasure of seeing over 50 plays this year and there is no question that...

It is fair to say that there are a good few moments of very surreal happenings in Ben Ockrent's new play about lesbians, brothers and sisters and babies. Whether the cast are wearing odd costumes, getting into antics with flour or maybe even more oddly singing Swedish language eighties classics.  The last of which is used rather cleverly to develop the set, but to be honest while it is an interesting way of doing this. It is more funny peculiar than funny ha ha, with the possible exeption of Jemima Rooper's redition of the Bonnie Taylor classic Total Eclipse Of The Heart. This truly is a funny moment and one which the audience on the night went wild for. The play tells the story of a lesbian couple and their desire to have a baby. The complication comes from one of the couple, Andrea's (Tamzin Outhwaite) desire to keep the genetics of her family, resulting in her request to her brother Jimmy (Nicholas Burns) for his sperm to impregnate her wife Caroline (Angela Griffin)...

When I attended Skylight  on 14th June, I was there purely for the stars, two of my favourites, Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan. It was a dream package for me when I heard it announced and there was no doubt that I would take the opportunity to see it live. The tickets were steep, very steep, £100 in the stalls, which seemed a ridiculous amount for a three hander, so I settled for the gods and my £20 in the grand circle. It was superb as I knew it would be and I was very impressed by David Hare's play as well, which as I say was secondary with no knowledge of it when I booked. Almost exactly a month later I was watching the play again live at a closer perspective, albeit being seventy miles from the theatre via National Theatre Live. Again I marvelled at the performers, but grew to like the play a little bit more as I sat in the plush seats of the Errol Flynn Filmhouse in Northampton. Therefore when on July 30th via @MichaelBott on Twitter the opportunity arose to see the pla...

I was in London again sooner than anticipated after getting an opportunity to see an understudy performance (more on this in the next blog), so I took the opportunity to see a play that had just missed out to  1984  ( review here ) on my previous visit. Let The Right One  at the Apollo could be best described as a vampire romance. Based on the novel and subsequent film (which I have not seen) by John Ajvide Lindqvist it tells the tale of a bullied teen Oskar played by Martin Quinn and his encounter with the mysterious Eli played by Rebecca Benson. What follows is a captivating and charming romance set to a background of vampiric intent. Quinn, staggeringly making his stage debut, is confident, funny and highly skilled in his performance. This role challenging him to the extreme in both performance and physicality. The final scene at the swimming pool is one of challenge and stamina and Quinn rises to it superbly. Benson as the mysterious Eli is quite simply super...

Its true to say that sometimes I could be won over by a production in the first minute or so, much I suppose like the opening line of a book maybe. 1984 from Headlong and Almeida Theatre did just that. The opening scene following the striking of the thirteenth hour begins with Winston Smith writing in his diary. After a time the lights of the stage go out and seemingly seconds later they are back on and six more members of the cast have appeared from seemingly nowhere and are perfectly posed to begin their roles. I can be won over maybe too easily by sound, visual and those choreographed tricks perhaps too much, but this one I think would easily win over most people. I know that it presented a number of gasps from the audience surrounding me. Gasps were plenty during the creators Robert Icke and Duncan MacMillan's new adaptation of Orwell's classic novel. There were so many visual and sound tricks with clever stage and set work there are too many to many to mention. People ...