Life Cycle
Life Cycle
Opera North Projects, Norwich Playhouse
Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2011
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 12 May 2011
Original music with haunting words chimes with mood; captures time, emotion and imagination. We have all been born, but only women have experienced childbirth.
This was an evening of old and new music that evoked pain and loss of stillbirth with the tribulations of new live birth.
John Reid (piano) and Oliver Coates (cello) opened with a prelude of three pieces on the theme of lullaby (Janacek, Mendelssohn and Messiaen). After an inexplicably long interval, Life Cycle followed.
Built round a song cycle, it was an evolving work without finite narrative, but giving us glimpses of being a mother. Toby Litt’s words and Emily Hall’s music dovetailed to create a succession of song fragments that told their own story.
‘There used to be a woman in this body, not just milk and carrying”, spoke volumes. It was Mara Carlyle’s versatile and beautiful singing that breathed life into the lyrics.
Lightmap provided both ethereal and gaunt images, projected onto cupboards. Put like that, it sounds strange. It wasn’t . It was life reflected.
Filed under: Reviews
A Game of You
A Game of You
Ontroerend Goed at The Garage, Norwich
Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2011
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 7th May 2011
The fringe festival got off to a dark, strange but fascinating start.
Audience members are led in singly, through tiny curtained rooms, one mirrored. You know you’ll participate and it’s going to be disturbing; you don’t know how.
It’s immersive theatre, relying on clever psychology, vanity, wariness and our self-consciousness. Like a 1960s Happening which at extremes catered for an audience of one, this is about you, quite literally. You are engaged in warm conversation with a stranger.
You are shown a film clip of an audience member you may have noticed outside, but don’t know. You are persuaded to play drama director, creating an imaginary life for that person. The friendly, beguiling stranger encourages you to make up things about this person from your inner mind.
Without giving too much away, you are being filmed at one point. Only after a time do you realise it is being shown to another in the moving audience who is being encouraged to invent a life for you!
At the end, you watch your befriender introducing himself to the newest audience member, pretending to be you, based on observing you. Be careful what you say. But you’ll be drawn in, either way.
Filed under: Reviews
Nicked
Nicked at High Tide Festival 2011,
The Cut, Halesworth
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 3rd May 2011
Halesworth’s High Tide Festival incubates new work and this year they surpass themselves with Nicked, a brave, innovative musical about last year’s still-unbelievable formation of the Coalition Government.
Dramatised from the unlikely material of Cameron, Clegg, Brown, Cable, Laws, Miliband, Balls, Osborne and politicos wheeling and dealing in the days after 2010’s inconclusive election, it works.
It’s being tried out in Halesworth, with fresh angles added as news breaks, scenes are still evolving. Last May’s events are fresh in people’s minds, so it has a contemporary feel with enough distance to be safe to laugh at.
Richard Marsh produced book and clever lyrics: ‘are you a man or a focus group?’, songs about proportional representation (at one point sung by Clegg to lull his baby to sleep) and cracking jokes about fairness and political reality.
Natalia Sheppard composed quality music from rock to beatbox. Pia Furtado’s unique choreography sets suited politicians dancing bizarrely, adding to the absurdist impact.
The 75 minute show doesn’t take itself too seriously, revelling in self-parody, satire and pastiche – ideal components of political musical. Perhaps a second half of continuously updated political shenanigans would make it viably full-length. Worth seeing locally now; it will blossom nationally.
David Porter
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Showstoppers! The Improvised Musical
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical
at Norwich Playhouse
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 22 February 2011
There are performer-improvisers, creating sketches from random audience suggestions in bizarre styles and settings. There are quality musical companies. And then there is Showstopper! the Improvised Musical.
Every night, the team of eight talented artists create a musical from scratch, based on ideas called out. A Director steers, sifting ideas (and unafraid to take risks, like male stripper), allowing the cast’s talents act, dance and sing the ad-hoc tale.
A packed Playhouse rocked with laughter as a Retirement Home in the future was chosen as setting. Styles from Les Miserables, Wicked, Annie and the Lion King were demanded with a tribute to Tim Burton tagged on, all under the title, How I Met Your Grandmother.
To improvise successfully, performers must work together in absolute mutual trust; these also need wide knowledge of musical theatre, film, TV, topical news and ability to sing in appropriate rhyme, time after time.
The amazing keyboard musician both lead and followed, conjuring moods as the show flew through time, across genres and finally to Buenos Aires for a climax.
Making as much sense as many musical plots, delivered with panache, originality, parody and style, it was both comic and touching. Brilliant.
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Echoes and Reflections
Thalia Theatre at Norwich Playhouse
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 26 November 2010
Echoes and Reflections
Thalia Theatre’s annual showcase is an opportunity to share an artistic exploration with friends and families of a team of committed and focussed people.
Developed over the past year to stimulate learning, excite creativity in thought-provoking work and challenging negative perceptions of disability, ‘Echoes and Reflections’ was inspired by a visit to St Peter Mancroft Church.
Following a gardener as central character, the narrative unfolded through his garden at first lovingly tended and then neglected as he grew older, and a journey he had to make to reach a heavenly destination, an echo of his past.
Each section was cleverly composed to reflect its own location, timeframe and emotional charge. The large group of participants moved well to tell the story, to create the sense of mystery, religious experience and transformation.
Drawing on physical movement, artwork and photography from the church, collaborative workshops and devising, exploiting a myriad of observed images, the whole was worked against a soundscape from the amazing Yoghurt Collective who created sound and music from bizarre to soothing, discordant to moving.
Artistic Director Molly Rose-Hutchinson envisioned a masterful piece and the discipline, interpretations and sheer enjoyment of everybody involved, whatever their ‘abilities’, was a joy.
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Death of a Salesman
Open Space Theatre Company
at Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in Eastern Daily Press and East Anglian Daily Times,
15 November 2010
Death of a Salesman
As the years advance, appreciation of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece deepens. That a man at 63 is too old and tired to be effective in business is at odds with today’s 60 being the new 40, but an older person losing his grip resonates still.
Paul Baker presents Willie Lomax, a once highly successful travelling salesman, staunch believer in the American Dream and hard work, liked and respected, with a well judged mix of anger, frustration, confusion, with sparks of the younger worker, husband and father.
The ever-impressive Yves Green is his wife, handling memories with joy and his decline, their quarrelsome sons and the fractured father/son relationship with stoic resignation (Mark Burridge and Peter Long, both good). The supporting cast, especially Patrick Quorn and Dawn Symonds, are spot on.
But for what is a painful, poignant and funny, bitter and distressing journey, full credit goes to director David Green for exploring the marriage, the brotherly relationship, the father/son issues in a well-paced, sympathetic yet forensic way.
The tragic conclusion, that a man who is broke and no longer able to earn a living, decides his life assurance policy will give his son a fresh start in life, is heartbreaking. That it arrives without sentimentality is the mark of a fine ensemble, which Open Space are.
Filed under: Reviews
The Origin of Species
The Origin of Species
Tangram Theatre
at Norwich Arts Centre
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 23 October, 2010
The evolution of the one-man show artform is overdue an academic study.
Add in acoustic guitar, original songs, physical comedy, awful puns and some challenging ideas, and The Origin of Species is a hybrid gem of the genre.
John Hinton wrote and presented the piece, narrated around parts of Charles Darwin’s life in the form of a running monologue interspersed with effective, unembarrassing audience participation and stand-up repartee delivered in a style reminiscent of Michael McIntyre.
It was billed as being ‘by means of Natural Selection or the Survival of (R)Evolutionary Theories in the Face of Scientific and Ecclesiastical Objections, a Musical Comedy.’ It largely delivered that.
There was a sense of the scientist’s delight in discoveries and connections about species, including man, that reflected the enormous controversy of his day. It’s a debate that still has potency.
There were no definitive answers; nor could there be when the existence of a Creator God was not argued away and people watched the play with the benefit of modern hindsight.
Clearly, though, John Hinton is a talent, and like his descent from tall man to convincing ape at the end, his ascent into a writing and performing presence will be quite something.
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Flhip-Flhop
Rannel Theatre Company
Norwich Playhouse
Review published in Eastern Daily Press, 1st October 2010
Flhip-Flhop
Hip-hop, street dance, rap, sampling and comedy theatre are acquired tastes. Rannel Theatre Company brought them to Norwich and a mixed-aged audience lapped them up and wanted more.
They rocked. They brought a refreshingly new and energetic take on a classic sketch that was unique and modern, yet also just good old-fashioned fun.
Two madcap decorators, young, very contemporary, painting walls but interfering with equipment and things they chanced upon in the apartment, mixing music, dance routines and comedy gags, in a gleeful romp across the absurd, at times surreal edges of life today.
The beatbox sounds and rhythms, the MC-rapping from both real music and from inside their crazy heads was the driving undercurrent. The superb timing and hilarious content of the physical movement was the power that hurtled the romp along.
Ninety minutes of fun took a basic comic scenario with phone messages, mishaps and clowning on the way, and held the crowd, making it special by using that clever comedic technique of pathos, even tears, behind the jollity, that was quite moving.
A triumph of multi-media live arts on stage, and a real antidote to a wet, dreary night.
Filed under: Reviews
The Soldier’s Tale
Chamber Orchestra Anglia
Playhouse Theatre, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 25 September 2010
The Soldiers Tale
A concert in aid of Help for Heroes was a perfect vehicle for Chamber Orchestra Anglia to show their skills in an entertaining and richly varied way, under the firm but sensitive baton of Sharon Choa.
A suite compiled from an original radio score by Benjamin Britten, Sword in the Stone, started the loosely-militaristic themed evening. This early work of some parody and musical directness demonstrated perfectly Britten’s emerging but unique voice.
Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale is set to a text from an old Russian folk tale. With repeated militaristic imagery and rhythms of jazz, ragtime, tango, waltz and marching, it demands the highest virtuosity and dexterity from the instrumentalists. They gave it in full measure.
The libretto was narrated beautifully by writer and broadcaster Nigel Rees, and he should have left his contribution to that alone. Leader of the orchestra Simon Smith gave a flawless interpretation.
The finale was Haydn’s Symphony No 1, popularly called the ‘Military’. Echoes of that reverberate throughout the four movements, a resounding piece from the late 18th century, with a voice that still speaks and moves today, particularly with British troops so active.
This orchestra is an asset to our region, with a growing reputation for high-quality, innovative work, and this performance did nothing but enhance it.
Filed under: Reviews