Black Shuck
Oskar Foxtrot Theatre at The Cut, Halesworth
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 21 July 2005
Black Shuck
The premiere of an East Anglian musical is both a rare and agreeable delight. This is a fascinating piece, part ghost story, part mix of local folklore and history, cunningly wrapped in a variety of new ideas.
Giving a new lease of life to the old shaggy dog story of Black Shuck, writer Andy Durham, lyricist Phil Corbett and composer Sarah Corbett have devised both entertainment and food for thought.
Was it just a demon dog, a devil hound who terrorised people 400 years ago? Or a cover for smugglers to keep away the over-curious? Or even a modern parable of fear, retribution and punishment?
It’s all that and more. The deepening of the evil in the Church is neatly achieved by linking the story to Annie Proudfoot, the first local woman to be hanged as a witch. Transitions from past to present are smoothly done.
The songs are almost all terrific, especially the company numbers and Dark Night of the Soul. The band is hot, light; their sounds make the atmosphere cool, heavy, and the acting is top notch.
The huge, young company is excellent. Principals are confident and supports are promising. Award-winning young people’s theatre group Oskar Foxtrot rises to the challenge of a full-scale musical magnificently. It has hit written all over it and deserves a massive audience as it continues on tour.
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The Improvisers
Theatre Royal, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 12 July 2005
The Improvisers
Most actors act. Some improvise. Some tell jokes. A few are stand-up comics. Some comics perform a good yarn.
But to do and be all at once takes a special performer – one of The Improvisers, in fact.
Stephen Frost brought his crack team of improvisers to town, his theatre without a safety net, and almost the only time we stopped laughing was to draw breath.
It’s one thing to go on stage with barely a notion of the way a sketch could go, but to be at the mercy of what the audience calls out – that’s another league.
Some audience suggestions teetered on the obscene, but were skilfully paried. Others strayed into the obscure (yetis in the shed), the bizarre (duck olympics) and the plain peculiar (grandma’s wake).
But nothing really fazed them. Every idea opened a flood of comic turns, twists and experiments.
The sheer speed of responses and gags, from the witty to the clever, the sublime to the ludicrous, was so impressive.
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Funny Money
Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich
Review Published in the Eastern Daily Press, 15 February 2008
Funny Money
One of the many strengths of the Maddermarket is the variety of its plays. Ray Cooney’s madcap romp is a highlight of the season. If farce is the comedy of extraordinary things that happen to ordinary people, this is a masterclass in the genre.
We have a full measure of almost believable characters caught in an increasingly ludicrous web of implausible white lies, inventions, distractions and downright absurdities.
Trevor Burton is a wonderfully slightly mad man who finds £735,000 in a suitcase and tries to hang on to it.
His wife (Dawn Brindle) drinks herself into a stupor to cope while their friends (Angela Goymer and Matthew Pinkerton) are in turn helpful and otherwise as they cover up the deceits.
In the Brian Rix School of Fun, it requires fast pace, superb comic timing and a darned good memory.
The excellent police officers (Jo Sessions and David Newham) can’t help compounding the confusion and the line, “let’s leave while we’re reasonably sane,” sums up the feeling in the audience, often helpless with laughter, as the madness takes over.
Director Judi Daykin gets the best from the small stage with lots of doors. The taxi driver (Steve Mears) is pricelessly near-normal and the happy ending rounds it off.
The only farcical ingredient missing is the dropped trousers, but there’s lots going on under a blanket! Thoroughly recommended.
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Strangers on a Train
Theatre Royal, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 15 August 2006
Strangers on a Train
There’s something about trains. Something about a good murder. Something about surprises. This play has the lot.
That old master of suspense Alfted Hitchcock always recognised a good yarn with complex twists and turns and that’s why he made it into a film.
Patricia Highsmith’s 1950’s psychological tale of murder translates well to the stage and has stood the test of time.
A cast including familiar faces – 60’s singer Anita Harris, former Dr Who Colin Baker, Emmerdale’s Leah Bracknell and Alex Fearns, formerly of EastEnders – all gel well and keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
Two strangers meet on a train. One dreams of the perfect murder in which each kills the other’s obstacle to happiness. What could be simpler?
However, no good thriller can be what it seems. The build up of plot and character is slow and sure and dramatic tension rises with the revelations. Highsmith’s first novel was so successful she was described as a modern Dostoevsky because of her treatment of human nature, guilt and morality. And that depth is the secret of this play.
Not just murder, but the weight of it. The unthinkable terror and a central character who, in the end, only wanted to be loved. The set is a clever sequence of sliding mini-rooms with a sense of period.
One jarring note is the American accents, which are hard to sustain. But in the end, they don’t matter. If you can get a ticket, it’s almost worth killing for this highly enjoyable and thoughtful journey.
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Animal Farm
Newfangled Theatre Company at the Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 June 2006
Animal Farm
Shocking brutality, culling the unwanted and dissenting, betrayal, deceit and fear should come as no surprise in the modern world.
George Orwell offered us his novelised fable of the destruction of a heaven on earth from within. Sir Peter Hall dramatised it. Adrian Mitchell added satirical lyrics and this still new company have turned it into a successful display of how humankind focuses on its own wellbeing, regardless of cost.
Chris Whiting as Napoleon was superbly sinister with a bent frame that chilled. He was ably supported by Tom Bailey as the alleged traitor Snowball, and the slimy sidekick Squealer (Joel Curtis) and they led a strong cast that strutted, hopped, slid, clucked and pawed across the stage as every kind of animal.
The pitifulness of their plight was horribly conveyed as the inevitability of the pig/man/pig ending drew near.
The pair of rottweilers was viciously evil and direction from Jo Warner was deft in places and inspired in others. Some opening night gaps in lighting and a little loss of pace here and there should be ironed out as the run proceeds, together with some jarring notes in a song or two.
Well worth it if you like original theatre and want to help fill the Seagull in what could be its final days.
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Low Life
Blind Summit Theatre at the Norwich Puppet Theatre
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 May 2006
Low Life
Four actor-puppeteers and puppets in a sleazy downtown bar hold sway, drawing us in to their bar stories with elegant choreography and the comedy of fringe-of-life-depression.
The alcoholic businessman, mistaking his wife for a dog, cannot bear to go home. The tiny Action Man mission-impossible plumber drowns. A wrinkled Chinese cleaner, so drawn into the book he is reading, murders it. They mix the boundaries between the manipulator and the manipulated.
And it’s all touchingly beautiful. A bar of identical ordinary little guys who parody paperback detective fiction, flow in and out of their reality.
Theses characters are puppets, yet they’re also the puppeteer/satirists, ever in sight, as one voice with their puppets. Equally, these puppets have an autonomy that is disturbing and part of the alchemy with costumes, apt music and talented performers.
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La Cuchina dell’Arte
Chapelfield Gardens, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 4 May 2006
La Cuchina dell’Arte
If you love circus in all its forms, ancient and modern, this one is for your collection.
It’s unique. Comedy without a safety net. The food-service industry without the hygiene.
Set in a kitchen-cum-restaurant, a straight-man chef and his hapless sidekick in big shoes invite two members of the audience on stage and make them pizza. Inevitably it turns out to be a burnt offering.
Directly inspired by vaudeville coming out of commedia dell’Arte, film makers and mimers, they cavort in magical physical nonsense. It takes real skill to clown, drop plates and spin plates while taking audience orders and spin dough till it flies through the air. But it takes a special skill to make it look easy.
From the opening in the dark trying to light candles and a chandelier, to endless audience interaction, it’s a non-stop caravan of versatility.
Comedy for adults, speaking gibberish and rapid Italian, stumbling over a stage littered with flour and broken crockery, there is something for everyone.
The whole thing is staged in a real small Big Top complete with tent flaps like a Tardis. Roll up, roll up for total enjoyment.
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The Mona Lisas
Theatre Melange at the Playhouse, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 7 October 2006
The Mona Lisas
Mona Lisa – the smile that launched a thousand spin-offs. Forgive me mixing my metaphors, but in a surreal performance artpiece, eclecticism comes as normal. It was a tour round the history of art from Da Vinci to Impressionism, then Cubism and Dada to Andy Warhol.
Loosely hung round this frame, six performers in search of something mixed unmatcheable images and sounds to create not a sense of wonder at the fusion of art and theatre, but bewilderment.
The Anglo-Romanian company is an international collaboration of cultures and history using the Italian painting stolen from France in 1911. Surrealism is a perfectly acceptable stage form. This had giant props, distorted dances, strangely sexual costumes and enough experimenting to satisfy most fans.
The mainly student audience lovedf the modern photo art, videoing the audience to pick out older people for mockery.
The best was the opening sequence of identical Mona Lisa masks – a metaphor for reality versus counterfeit. I think.
We don’t all understand art, but we know what we like. There was a wonderful Romanian argument stopped by an English actress crying out: “I wish someone would give me a translation”.
She spoke for us all.
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Marcus Brigstocke
The Playhouse, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 2 October 2006
Marcus Brigstocke
Tall, lanky, the liberal in corduroy, Marcus Brigstocke treated us to a comic style that was a cross between a chat in your own front room and a loopy, clowning schoolboy winding up the teacher but impressing his mates.
His targets were mainly predictable – Labour and Blair, George Bush, terrorism, air travel, transport, the French, Jamie Oliver, Daily Mail readers, the Scots and the EU. Material on the Olympic Games, children and TV adverts was more unexpected, but some of the religious and/or racial gags fell flat.
While parts were hilariously funny, others were puzzling – why not sing the song that was threatened throughout?
The audience question and answer session that passed for an encore added little. People posed such off-the-wall questions as – would you go to space? Is Ron Atkinson a racist?
But then again, weird comes as normal on comedy nights!
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Dangerous Corner (1)
Bruce James Productions at the Marina Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 7 September 2006
Dangerous Corner
Another offering by Bruce James Productions in the Marina Theatre’s long-term project to bring quality drama to the stage, sees this JB Priestly classic given a successful outing.
One of his renowned ‘time plays’, it’s an absorbing tale based on the notion that if one simple thing had distracted somebody – a piece of dance music played instead of an inquiry into the link of a music box to a suicide – then subsequent history would have been different.
Nobody would be any wiser about the lies and deceit everyone covered up.
It is not such a new idea these days, but must have been almost revolutionary when it was written. This rendition keeps much of the 1930s feel, the cut-glass accents and people ‘talking rot’ within an after-dinner setting in a grand drawing room.
However, the producer has sharpened it up with overlapping dialogue in the arguments to raise tension and give it a more naturalistic, less stylised atmosphere.
The effect works to draw the audience in, intrigued as revelation is piled on twist. While characters crack under the strain, truth, as so often, is the victim.
It’s not so much that we care for the characters, but the effective dramatisation of a timeslip makes for an enjoyable evening’s entertainment with that extra pause for thought about the real nature of time.
Filed under: Reviews