Latitude Poetry Club
Norwich Arts Centre
Review written for Eastern Daily Press, not used
Performance poetry is a neglected art form that is staging something of a comeback. It draws heavily on stand-up comedy, making this stand-up poetry.
Three ‘now’ poets performed observational verse, rhyming and blank, as commentary on life, love, the universe and, well, everything, really.
Luke Wright hosted another installment of his Latitude Poetry Club with keenly observed pieces on touring gigs as holidays, the Essex phantom lion, his paunch and his dream woman.
Andy Bennett changed tempo with pieces on the consequences of alcohol, Guy Fawkes, Parliament, the ‘mask of apathy’ and the lost, early morning young man going home. His style was more political, finger-wagging, folk poetry.
Byron Vincent claimed ‘not to be clever enough to be a poet, not funny enough to be a comedian’. In fact he is both. At 37 he looks young but ‘not good’ for his age.
He suffers bi-polar disorder and his dialogues with women, his spiritual journey across religions, his lament at the blandification of town centres and his accounts of treatment of the mentally ill were hilarious yet carried a thoughtful punch in every tale.
A night to remember indeed!
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The Lover
Foolhardy Actors Company at Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 25 September 2012
Harold Pinter’s little-performed early play seeps realistic-unreality, comic irony and nervy menace from ordinary life.
Will Isgrove directed Sharn McDonald and Thom Bailey masterfully playing the outwardly sophisticated couple relishing erotic games to enliven their marriage.
Their daily fantasy is that she entertains an afternoon lover while he goes to work and meets a whore. Then the husband tires of inventing roleplays and wants to stop, but she doesn’t.
He then switches back to pretending the adultery, as the relationship becomes more intense, repressive and strangely intimate.
The piece is a measured roller-coaster of tangled emotion, with early hints of pause and ear for natural, circular dialogue that later made Pinter famous.
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Compagnie Bam
Hippodrome Circus, Gt Yarmouth
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 11 September 2012
A riot of anarchic, electrifying contemporary circus came to town as part of the Out There Festival. Nowadays performers must be magnificent tumblers and acrobats, and then brilliant comedians, musicians, singers and dancers!
Compagnie Bam are five energetic masters of the Chinese pole and teeterboard who began with a warning not to use phones or cameras by smashing some examples up.
From then on, surreal was normal, with characters entering as if inmates from an historical asylum. They made every routine look easy, cavorting skilfully through fast-paced madcap lunacy of the inspired kind, interacting comically and absurdly.
Three giant planks and two massive mattresses supported Olympic-standard gymnastics. A darker sequence in the middle explored the borders of gender. A crazy drummer on a trolley had it pulled into separate sections.
The whole was choreographed beautifully, with unison and slo-mo that defined them as a dance ensemble too. Cool live rock music and sound effects punctuated the whole superbly.
What was it about? A note was passed explaining ‘definitions of stupidity’. It was entitled Switch, but really it was about everything and nothing. Brilliant.
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Five Finger Exercise
Southwold Summer Theatre
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 10 September 2012
The Southwold season of drama ends with a little gem from the pen of Peter Shaffer, who gave us Equus, Amadeus and Black Comedy.
Five finger exercises are piano training techniques in dexterity, strength and coordination. A piano is the background motif as a dysfunctional family face growing up, ghosts from the past and personality struggles.
Iain Ridley plays the troubled young man, at university but still bound by home and loyalty ties, on the threshold of real adulthood. Ann Wenn is his mother, calm and proper on the outside, but a turmoil of frustrated emotions inside.
Michael Shaw is his self-made father, uncultured and vulgar, yet holding his family with a powerful grip. Holly Jones is the teenage sister, just discovering that life is not easy.
Peter Hoggart plays the German tutor/lodger who bottles his painful past within while struggling with the family he cares about tearing each other apart, almost as an ‘exercise’.
They are a fine cast, doing an excellent job of mutual loathing, outward respectability and comic moments. It’s an absorbing and intellectually challenging performance well worth the evening out.
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Two and Two Make Sex
Southwold Summer Theatre
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 8 August 2012
The time for a good barmy sex shenanigans romp has arrived at the Southwold Summer Theatre season.
This piece by Richard Harris and Leslie Darbon takes on the hilarious if predictable confusions and comic madnesses of the farce genre and mixes them with liberal doses of homespun psychology – ‘psychiatrists have their problems too.’
It’s all a form of commentary on our oldest institution – ‘marriage is like a bath, the longer you lie in it, the colder it gets!’
Michael Shaw plays the flustered middle-aged man suffering loss of libido, Rosanna Miles his would-be lover looking for a father-replacement figure and Ann Wenn his wife who decides that two can play silly games.
Iain Ridley is the clever-dick pseudo psychiatrist who bites off more than he can chew. Sarah Ogley makes the friendly agony-aunt role fully credible and Richard Blain plays the long-lost real father with splendid 1970s’ style.
Richard Frost directs and makes much of the two settings on stage, keeping up a rattling pace and drawing out the very funny lines to offer a lively, irresistible night to entertain all ages.
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Write Me a Murder
Southwold Summer Theatre
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 26 July 2012
Every summer season needs at least one good murder. This is it.
A clever plot, told well and set in the obligatory ramshackle country house with dark nights outside and creakings upstairs concerns a watertight plan to do away with a thoroughly unpleasant man.
The play uses the devices of whodunnit writers to pose a hypothetical solution to a problem. However, the perfect murder is a rare thing, and the curse of the unexpected thwarts the perpetrators.
At the heart of it are two brothers, the Cain and Abel story in a sense. The older one is to inherit the estate and title, the younger one has nothing except a writer’s imagination. Mark Jackson and Jonny McPherson play them with panache, both cunning men, with little love lost between them.
Jill Freud is their astute former nanny/doctor who misses little. The brash outsider is captured convincingly by Simon Snashall while Kate Middleton is his long-suffering wife who thinks she will be free of him and wants only to be loved.
Director Phil Clark keeps the pace of twists and turns going and the final comeuppance is satisfying and timed perfectly.
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When We Are Married
Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 21 July 2012
This little-performed comic gem offers penetrating insight into England a hundred years ago.
It’s a study in social mores, class, male/female relationships, the north/south divide, the West Riding of Yorkshire of JB Priestley’s youth and, above all, respectability.
Lines like ‘trouble at mill’, ‘the little woman’ and ‘she picked well from the lucky bag in marrying me’ are funny but attitudes sound shocking to today’s minds.
Three couples celebrate the twenty fifth anniversary of their marriages at the same chapel on the same day. They discover the parson was unqualified, so they’re not actually married, which sets the cat among the pigeons, unleashing comic mayhem.
Robin Dauncy, James McGarry and Matthew Pinkerton play the pompous, useless and henpecked husbands. Their wives Cassie Tillett, Kiera Long and Julie Benfield are in fine form.
Helen Haines is the cheeky servant girl, Jude Wyatt the nosy kitchen hand, John Hare the drunk local paper photographer while Lawrence Russell and Rebecca McClay as love’s young dream are a good foil to the hardened long-marrieds.
Genevieve Raghu directs at a lively pace, treading that line between outright farce and social history. It’s warmly recommended.
David Porter
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A Bedfull of Foreigners
Southwold Summer Theatre
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 13 July 2012
The summer theatre season in Southwold got off to a splendid, inspired and madcap start with Dave Freeman’s 1970s version of the farce genre.
This does exactly what it says on the tin – comic characters in ludicrous situations employing quick thinking that makes matters worse via some very funny lines. Oh yes, and enough trouser dropping to keep everybody laughing.
Anthony Falkingham directs, making the most of the space and entrances and achieving that sometimes elusive balance between the predictable and the new angle on old themes.
Terry Malloy, famed in The Archers and as Dr Who’s arch-enemy Davros, takes the lead.
Strong performances from Clive Flint, Iain Ridley, Sarah Ogley, Penelope Rawlins, Michael Shaw and Rosanna Miles ensure they all tumble through the crackingly-paced absurdities with high energy and manic hilarity.
The mistaken identities and confusions are heightened by the fact that everybody is a ‘foreigner’ in this story set in France. How they almost all end up in one of the pair of double beds is a clever but nonsensical contrivance of rollicking good fun that warms the heart, whatever the summer weather.
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Save the Last Dance for Me
Marina Theatre, Lowestoft
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 5 July 2012.
Fresh from the creators of the top-rated Dreamboats and Petticoats, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, comes a musical concoction set in the early 1960s.
It is appropriate that it should come to Lowestoft en route to the West End, as much of it is set in the town of that time. Memories flood back.
The plot is simple – black US airman and white English girl fall in love when she and her sister take a week’s seaside holiday against their parents’ wishes.
But music brings it to youthful life. Reliving the hit songs of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, the on-stage band pump out classics like This Magic Moment, Sweets for My Sweet, A Teenager in Love, Suspicion, Viva Las Vegas, Marie’s the Name, Then He Kissed Me and Save the Last Dance for Me.
This is a polished concert of treasured tunes bridging rock ‘n’ roll with commercial teen pop and heralding the hippie era to come from a versatile cast of actors/musicians dancing like kids did then.
There is humour aplenty in English and American language confusions. It’s nostalgic fun, high energy, feel-good and worth grabbing a ticket before they’re all gone.
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Le Grand C
Compagnie XY in Le Grand C at the Hippodrome, Gt Yarmouth, part of Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2012.
Review published in the Eastern Daily Press, 28 May 2012
The Hippodrome’s traditional arena was the perfect staging for a show that took circus art form in new directions.
French ensemble Compagnie XY presented Le Grand C, a piece of theatre combining circus acrobatics with physical theatre and choreography. It was beautifully measured, slow and mysteriously dream-like at the start as the scale of performance skills were displayed.
Four-person towers and pyramids were created, then carefully gave way to new controlled contortions. All 17 in the troupe relished tumbles, mid-air somersaults and flying from one cluster to another, literally. It was a fusion of observational mime and physicality, demanding and challenging.
There were bundles and clever, amusing little interactions between performers, particular pairings for a moment of action, then a different combination. It was continuous flow of action by total-trust theatre, with safety very much provided by each other, but as part of the show.
The crowd gasps throughout said it all. This was impressive wow factor, circus but not as we know it. They can’t come back soon enough.
Filed under: Reviews