A Small Mind At The Theatre

I arrived at St Peter's Church for Looking Glass Theatre's Sleeping Beauty slightly jaded and apprehensive for my third pantomime of the season. However I always love to support this little theatre and this years show had the bonus of having a quartet of those magnificent University of Northampton students that I get great pleasure in also supporting. The four on this occasion were Matt Larsson, Tara Lawrence, Nikki Murray, Ashley Thomas Sopher and they made a quite excellent and youthful quartet and showed surprising skills in the challenging art of pantomime (no doubt very useful to have on the CV). Tara held the obvious affinity for working with children following her Flash Festival success the children's storytelling show and she has that quietly gentle style that offers no menace. Here she was once again joyful and even as a baddie in the second act remained playful. Ashley was quite a revelation as the dame of the show, playing up the part with glee and doing everyt...

I first saw Killed by the Looking Glass Theatre in its first incarnation by the company in July 2014. Last weekend I had the pleasure of seeing it in its third version at their new home of St Peters Church. Also new were the cast and unlike that first version, I was familiar with each one of them as all five were the University Of Northampton BA Acting graduates of 2015. Both a masterstroke of casting and a huge extension of kindness of the theatre to give them all these roles. It was also visionary of them as unlike that first version (with all due respect), these actors were at the very point of their lives to play these roles like no other. All maybe within a year perhaps of the actual characters featured and with the world ahead of them. However sadly these characters portrayed lived in a more terrifying world (although many troubles still remain) and some had no lives ahead of them. Leading the cast as Billy Dean is Dale Endacott, a recruit who finds himself through a terrible...

Sidetrack Theatre's neat trick of not really having a show of more than five minutes had the impressive effect of negating any technical faults that might occur. I remain oblivious now as to how much was meant to go wrong, however it was all dealt with flair that everything other than the set collapsing could be permitted. The Zugzwang's opening is spectacular, funny and exhausting. It also provided me with an alien body in my hot chocolate that this time wasn't a marshmallow. Balloon, party poppers, great tubes of confetti and an exhilarating physical sequence lasted: time check - five minutes tops. The chap on the front row and his watch required and demanded more despite Samantha Ahweyevu's pleas otherwise. So a team huddle later we have a show, sort of. The pretence remains throughout that this is being made up on the fly, but this is of course all a fib. You have to rehearse well for things to go this wrong. A Zugzwang apparently is a situation where a move or ...

A man in twenties Russia wants to kill himself. Let's all laugh hysterically, it seems right? Well it does during Moira Buffini adaption of Nikolai Erdman's satirical black comedy, The Suicide. Our protagonist Semyon Semyonovich (a masterful performance by Matt Larsson) has a double barrelled sausage and wants to have an end to it all. Indeed why wouldn't he want to end it? His failure at playing the Tuba because he doesn't have a piano, his most hideous (but, oh so funny) mother-in-law Serafima (a comic mastery performance from Sophie Poyntz Lloyd) always there giving him aggro. Then his wife Masha (a gentle, and very lovely performance from Sarah Kirk) leaves him. He really might as well top himself. If only there was a cause he could die for. Step forward neighbour Alexander (an effortless performance by Dale Endacott) and his (for a price) revolving door of potential causes for Semyon to die for. So we have through the doors in order Aristarkh (John Shelley provid...