A Small Mind At The Theatre

Hot on the heels of their award-winning production of Peter Quilter's Glorious! , White Cobra Productions turn to another of the writer's back catalogue for their very next production. It is easy to see why they should choose to do so, as Duets (a comedy about couples), is a stunningly well-written piece, formed of a quartet of plays loosely linked around the theme of love and romance. What is very apparent watching Duets is the surprising strength of all of the pieces, there is no filler here to complete the four. Indeed a conversation after the show resulted in three people coming to the conclusion that we each liked a different one, and I have no doubt that in the bar there was someone who had the other as their favourite. Each of the four segments also has a very different style to it, the opening play Blind Date revels in silliness and awkwardness to create it's comedy, while Secretarial Skills creates some extremely clever humour while also working to a very s...

I have seen very little restoration comedy, and with Playhouse Creatures  early this year, very much Restoration period, Masque Theatre has provided much of it this year, with this edition of Aphra Behn's 1677 play The Rover or The Banish'd Cavaliers . Behn was quite a landmark writer, recognised as one of the first women to make a living from writing (and has an extraordinary real-life worth researching). Perhaps having watched The Rover now, you can see why her work might well have been accepted back then. It is suitably bawdy, really extremely rude at times in places, definitely farcical (with disguise situations aplenty that wouldn't fool a blind man with a blindfold on) and perhaps most importantly, makes the woman much of the time the victims in the frequent sexual exploits. It clearly wasn't being anything that a man of the time wouldn't write, and probably means it lay a suitable path for success for Behn as a result. The Rover itself is tremendous...

Bernie Wood (Cleopatra) & Matt Fell (Antony) Unless you are one of the gold chain rattling members and higher echelons at the top of The Globe theatre and planning on evicting your innovative artistic director, the good old Bard is currently rife for exploiting in setting, gender and dynamics of theatre, and for me perhaps he should be. It is not as if after 400 odd years there haven't been enough opportunities to see "pure" Shakespeare. Hence why long before I made my way to see Masque Theatre's production of Antony & Cleopatra this week at Abington Park museum, I was already pretty excited to see it. The very reason is that having had the privilege of seeing female Malcolm's and Richard II's in the last few years via the University of Northampton shows, a nicely split gender balance from this show thanks to innovative casting by director John Myhill was on the cards. Throw in a bit of Mike Oldfield to open proceedings and you are going somewher...

Remarkably I only saw the classic film It's A Wonderful Life last Christmas, this was thanks to spotting it lurking on my subscription of Netflix. A glorious heartwarming film perfect for Christmas? That must be why I was a blubbering mess at the end of it then. There was hope that in public, The Masque Theatre's performance of the radio version of the story didn't leave me in the same situation. As it happened it did a little as that final scene in the Bailey household played out again, but it didn't matter as there were members of the cast in the same broken state as many of us audience members. Left to right: Jo Molyneux, John Myhill, Lisa Wright, Michael Street, Lisa Shepherd and Jof Davies This was the first radio play that I had seen performed and on the evidence of this, I sure would like to see some more. While not having the drama of standard plays in their creation of moment and places, they do have a rather striking drive towards character creation. The ...