A Small Mind At The Theatre

It would frankly be strange to mention the curtain call for a show at the very beginning of a review, however for Ten , a celebration of ten years of work from the Youth Theatre, Young Company and The Actors, is epitomises perhaps everything to say of the show. A near work of art in itself to shepherd 188 performers onto the stage as quickly, but as respectfully as possible to each individual, is a mind boggling proposition. A curtain call should never be underappreciated, as it is how you leave your audience, and Ten got it perfect. Those 188 performers created during this 90 minute show a collection of original pieces and selected extracts from plays performed in the past. From the original pieces, Gathering Dust by Georgia Tillery was my favourite, offering a fabulous response from the audience as well as the really young youth theatre group portrayed a collection of old folk attempting to make a break for freedom. It was a really funny piece, which the youngsters clearly had gre...

You see strange things at the theatre. You see weird things at the theatre. You see peculiar things at the theatre. Then you see The Annual General Meeting of a Medium-Sized Firm of Accountants by The Arts Lab and absolutely nothing has prepared you for this day. The day that you leave to the interval, having watched Samuel Jones as accountant Seth Lopod sing about wanting more from life. Wanting to be an octopus, a gay octopus, who wants another octopus to ejaculate his ink on your face. While the audience joins in with the chorus. Yep, it's clear that nothing could ever prepare you for that. The Arts Lab are a relatively recently formed group within Northampton who generally throw ideas about and create what appear to be incredibly random pieces such as this. I remarked in a conversation at the interval that the show appeared to be like throwing ideas at the wall and seeing which ones bounced back. I later learned that this whole show had occured from a Twitter exchange of...

Last year I saw Orientation , one of two devised shows that form the first part of public performances from the now grown-up third years of the University of Northampton BA Actors course. It was a simply incredible beast of a show, which remains very possibly in my top five shows that I have seen, anywhere. Shrapnel , this years first devised show directed by Stewart Melton doesn't come close to that, however that far from means it is a failure. It does though have a more punchy moral at its core. Formed purely from the work of the actors and directors and their knowledge and research of life on the streets, Shrapnel tells the story of the homeless, the charity chuggers and the passersby. The chuggers are perhaps the key characters in this piece, driving the greater part of the witty repartee and emotion. Played by Kundai Kanyama, Jamal Franklin, Jessica Bridge, April Lissimore and Connor McCreedy, each brings their own particular quirk to their role, making them all very much i...

The last two years have been an interesting path for the Northampton Musical Theatre Company at the Derngate. In 2014 their presentation of South Pacific was a remarkable feat which stood up so well in comparison with the soon to be professional staged Oklahoma! Then 2015 they took what might have been quite a gamble with a much less known title Sister Act, despite it being a huge film hit of the past, the musical was somewhat less known. It was a gamble that unquestionably paid off as the theatre was filled and it remains not just the very best amateur production of a musical I have seen, but superior in so many ways to professional touring shows. So maybe, just maybe, 2016's decision to present Grease as their big show has got to be a disappointment. I myself up to seeing this show hadn't seen Grease in a theatre live, but a lot of people have and I have spoken to many who were not going to this simply because they are, in my own contortion of their thoughts Greased out. Ho...

I had created so much anticipation for myself with Danny Hero at The Core, that there was perhaps an almost inevitability that it would end up a disappointment. Sadly it was, despite it still be a tremendously entertaining show. That is a brilliantly weird introduction to a review, so I think I should explain myself. I personally believe that the pre-publicity for the show had a seriously contrasting positive/negative effect and offers interesting thoughts on how to publicise a show. Trailers by their inherent nature offer nuggets of delight, often making a show appear far better than it turns out. Those behind Danny Hero chose to run a large bulk of publicity with a YouTube recording of a song from the show, Man Of Steel . It worked in selling my ticket, as after I heard it, it was pretty much 90% of the reason I decided to make absolutely sure I got to see the show. So, it did its job. Ensemble However the problem lies with the fact that Man Of Steel is a simply incredible m...

An unexpected call from a friend who had received a free ticket, à la Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket, to go and see a circus for free, left me sitting in a circus tent a few hours later for the first time in about thirty years. It was a wise, albeit on occasion, scary decision. I have to confess that when seeing shows like this, where there is an element of danger involved I do tend to squirm into the chair I sit. This happened mostly during the opening act of the second half of the show, the suitably titled Wheel Of Death. I rolled into an uncomfortable ball, while the five or six year old behind me gleefully shouted that "they are going to die!". This was a scary welcome to the second act, after the first much more relaxing first half. It works excellently and is credit to producer and director Mark Whitney that the show is perfectly balanced, with the bulk of traditional circus arts in the first half, while the more spectacular and often more modern feeling ...

After clocking up over two hundred and fifty theatre reviews in less than three years, I nonchalantly thought that any show I have thrown at me, I can confidently cover. That was before I went to see Masque Theatre's production of the Anthony Horowitz play Mindgame last evening. A cast of three weave you into a mysterious web, where absolutely nothing is what it seems and leaves a terrified reviewer the prospect of trying not to reveal those weaves. I am of course bold and brave(ish) though, so this will not trouble me. Too much. First performed in 1999, Mindgame sees true crime writer Mark Styler (William Portch) arrive at the optimistically named mental institution Fairfields. His target is to meet, interview, profile, and tell the life story of inmate Easterman, a notorious serial killer. In charge at the hospital is Dr. Farquhar (Vince Perry), a bold presence, but surprisingly confused character to be in charge of such important patients. Completing our cast of characters is ...