A Small Mind At The Theatre

The enduring favourite with youth theatre groups gets the Royal & Derngate Youth Theatre/Young Company treatment under the directorship of the Youth Theatre Manager, Ashley Elbourne, and between them, they do as much as they can with the show. With this, my second viewing of Bugsy Malone , it is becoming more apparent to me that the show itself is a little flimsy in some areas. It has a fabulous, single wacky premise (Splurge Guns and custard pie deaths), that doesn't have the strength for a whole show, especially when you discover that Paul Williams book isn't quite strong enough to keep the interest, and certainly not as strong as some of his music. It helps though that the cast is clearly all having fun, much more than in a previous production youth production I saw a couple of years ago. Owen Howard as the lead continues to grow as a performer on the stage in his turn here as the lead. He has a confident stage presence and more especially, a charm which makes Mr Mal...

Two years ago this week, I saw for the first time the older faction of the Royal & Derngate Youth Theatre perform Sweeney Todd (I had seen one month before the younger part create the delightful Honk!). While a quite brilliant level of standard has continued in their productions since, nothing has quite reached that optimum point of Sweeney for me. Oliver! is their latest production and this epic scale show merges all of the age groups together to create a spellbinding piece of youthful and lively theatre that is rightfully packing the auditorium like no R&D youth show before. I have to say straight up that Oliver! does not beat the legend that is Sweeney for me, however it comes as close as we have ever been to doing so. A lot of this perhaps is down to my personal taste and Sweeney's two stunning leads, which have yet to be bettered. The macabre nature of Sweeney also gelled with me and Lionel Bart's tale, despite being packed with more known tunes than seems possib...

The cover note for the script of Oladipo Agboluaje's Immune describes it as "a challenging science fiction play with a large cast", and the word challenging in this case is not a lie. This is a fast paced, multi-cast changing script which leaves little room for error for its young cast in the performance. If the script isn't enough to handle for the young performers, director Christopher Elmer-Gorry and designer Carl Davies have made the situation even more complex for the actors with the set and stage work. Having to manhandle great panels on wheels and a huge cube, which also splits in two occasionally, during scene changes requires skill, coordination and cooperation of a high level. As if all this is not enough, the actual story is epic enough for the relatively small stage of the Royal. Attempting to form an apocalyptic world (albeit only happening in Plymouth) offers challenges in itself, but Agboluaje's script does that in a sort of apocalypse in the teac...