Sussex Playwrights Reviews: God of Carnage

Yasmina Reza’s award winning 2008 play all feels very contemporary; a middle class comedy of manners for now, with the main theme ‘what lies beneath?’

Yasmina Reza’s award winning 2008 play all feels very contemporary; a middle class comedy of manners for now, with the main theme ‘what lies beneath?’

On the surface, it all starts in such a civilised, cultured way. Coffee and clafoutis, chaise longues and tulips. Two pleasant couples, meeting for a nice chat about a little … disagreement … between their young sons. Then all begins to unravel.

Roger Kay’s direction is tight, pacey and assured, delivering a quartet of pin-sharp and pointedly observed performances. Physical and verbal energy fizz in the tiny Rialto space, with a lovely sofa shift from one couple per sofa to the men briefly united in rum and resentment on one and the women united on the other.

Tom Dussek’s urbane Alain is bullish and confident, barking orders into an endlessly intrusive mobile, while making light of the ‘boys will be boys’ situation – until the appearance of the rum shifts his focus, never really on family responsibility, always on his own terms

Jenny Delisle as Annette battles with anxiety over her husband’s refusal to engage over their son’s deed, until the shock vom scene brings everything to crisis point, in a brittle study in how it can all become too much to bear.

As Veronique and Michel, parents of the injured boy, Sophie Dearlove and Neil James are the ‘nice’ ones, Veronique committed to supporting every good cause and Michel gently supporting the women in his life – yet revealing a surprisingly cruel streak.

Of course, the boys’ playground spat isn’t the only instance of childish rage boiling over; little digs and bubbling anger begin to mount, each character brooding over their own stored up issues, the civilised veneer scraped away as the booze takes hold and the masks slide off.

One of the most attention-grabbing and interest-gripping pieces I’ve seen on the Fringe, thanks to terrific harmony of writing, directing, performance and staging.

But I’m left with questions … What happened to the poor little hamster? Does mum stop taking the tablets? What happens next??

Philippa Hammond

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Caitlin

Caitlin

by Mike Kenny

WLTM Productions

Performed by Christine Kempell

There’s a moment in the play where Caitlin asks us just why audiences want to watch others’ pain. And in a month where the world is watching two stars rip each other to bits in public – it’s a great and timeless question.

This piece by Mike Kenny shows us Caitlin’s pain – married to the genius Dylan Thomas, she was a dancer, but if she hadn’t married him, would we ever have heard of her?

Visceral, passionate and raw, the writing opens up old wounds and reveals deep and dreadful love for an unfaithful alcoholic slob.

We’re drawn into their world – the babies and the ghastliness of childbirth, infidelity, violation and violence, including her own attack on Dylan, the stifling little Welsh world she found herself trapped in, the glorious landscape, the mother in law she loathed – and there are moments of laughter, observations on the ridiculous situations she somehow found herself in. This just wasn’t the life she’d thought she’d have, but there’s a sense of inevitability here, the feeling that they’re both trapped and doomed by their mutual fatal-flaw addiction to the booze.

Racketing between loathing and love, indifference and absolute possession, Kempell gives a powerhouse of a performance. Rich-voiced, physical and athletic, she’s absolutely magnificent in Caitlin’s tenderness, eroticism and rage.

Currently in performance at the Rialto for Brighton Fringe and heading to Edinburgh this August

Philippa Hammond

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: An Accidental Birth of an Anarchist

Sussex Playwrights Reviews:
An Accidental Birth of an Anarchist
By Luke Ofield
Directed by Neil Sheppeck
Assistant Director Francesca Boccanera
 
A live theatre performance at The Space, streamed online
 
Alice: Aurea Williamson
Lia: Pip O’Neill
Captain: Michael Jayes
Radio Ben: Gabriel Thomson
 
Two amateur activists get employed on a North Sea oil rig with the sole intention of exercising their right to stage a sit-in protest.
 
Taken from interviews with XR activists and former oil rig engineers, Luke Ofield’s new play at The Space Arts Centre, London is headlining Rising Tides’ Good Cop, Bad Cop 26 festival running alongside the Cop26 talks.
 
A simple set, a thrust stage, scaffolding around the edges with some control panels set the scene.
 
The conversation flows – and it’s a super-current conversation, tapping into everything happening today around climate change and pollution, female voices protesting for the future as the People’s Movement to Protect the Planet.
 
It can feel a bit of an Extinction Rebellion manifesto lecture, yet there are laughs, a wry, dry sense of humour and tetchy wrangling – ‘is this a hostage situation or a therapy session?’ as the enforced company spark snarky little rows while their alliance is starting to form.
 
Tight direction ensures performances bounce along with keen bubbly enthusiasm and urgent intensity from Williamson’s pink cardi-clad mum saving the world for the children and O’Neill’s boiler-suited young idealist with the stats at her fingertips.
 
In contrast, Jayes is a deep and dignified presence, a pragmatic been there, seen it all – til now, with Thomson’s unseen radio voice dialling in chirpy live interjections adding a great sense that there’s a bigger world out there, in the Mrs Wolowitz / Carlton the Doorman tradition.
 
On a technical note – Maybe it’s the venue acoustics, the tech broadcast set up, the internet connection, and with some outside noise and the storm effects, but it was sometimes hard to hear and follow the dialogue and story, especially in heightened moments. I was watching the live stream online so the in-theatre experience would be different.
 
The emergency crisis threatening to overwhelm the rig where they have to work together to avert disaster, putting aside their differences with intergenerational alliance, anger and ‘why won’t you do something’ passion is very now.
 
And it’s another new experience for Sussex Playwrights, being able to enjoy live theatre streamed from London online.
 
Ideal for those who can’t yet go out or go to smaller venues, it opens up the habit of theatre-going to a potentially entirely new audience, and offers equality and inclusion to an existing audience that would love to be able to be there. It’s a great new way to be part of Theatre audiences, and an option I think that is and should be here to stay.
 
90 minutes with a short interval, the play continues 3-12 November at The Space, 269 Westferry Road, London E14 3Rs
 
Philippa Hammond

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Am I Invisible Yet?

Am I Invisible Yet?

Written and performed by Dunstan Bruce
Directed by Sophie Robinson
Produced by Tom Dussek
Movement coach Jack Kristiansen
Lighting tech Katy Matthews

British band Chumbawamba were for thirty years anti authority, anti fascism, anti authoritarianism, pro rights for all and the class struggle – or, ‘what are you rebelling against?’ ‘what have you got?’

A packed audience of friendly fans greeted a barnstorming new solo show written and performed by band member Dunstan Bruce.

Middle age creeps up and suddenly – there it is. And we have a choice; go gently or go raging. Dunstan’s chosen to rage, rant and roar.

Now for most of us with a pre-digital past, there are boxes of photos, cassettes, maybe the odd VHS.

In future we’ll all be haunted by our billions of digital photos and reels, those ‘ten-years-back’ Facebook surprises already a jolt.

But what if you were in a band? There’s already TV clips, TOTP, chat shows, you in performance, in the papers, in youth. How you looked, how you moved, how you sounded, how you were. Then.

Dunstan’s pursued by the past, memories played out on the old telly screen of the mind; here a back wall screen and projector.

It’s a piece of performance poetry and physical theatre, recited, chanted, repeated, lyrics, slogans, questions and demands, scraps of remembered song.

Often angry and despairing, his clips echoed by glimpses of today’s young female activists, you sense the pride and support for this new generation taking over the rage mantle.

At its best, it’s funniest and most engaging when vulnerability and simplicity take over from the bravado, in the chatty ‘I can’t sing’ spontaneous bits round a guitar folk song.

Standout moments include a physical bit with – a fall? A tantrum? Then ‘Did you see what I did there? I got up!’ had the audience howling.

And some great use of the space, one with a megaphone racing all round the theatre building, downstairs, under the auditorium and back up the other side, emerging panting and triumphant.

From coat to pants the palette’s grey, beige and dull – but there’s a red mini skirted bathing costume and garish suit in the mix, that Am I Invisible Yet? sense of naughty irreverence mixed with the challenge.

A touch of clever lighting closes the show as the spotlight shrinks and focuses down to final moments on his face and a message of hope.

In the end, it feels like a show with two personas. Angry-funny, inyerface-endearing; the punky performance poet and the more mellow, reflective, self mocker, who for me was the most captivating.

There’s more subtlety, nuance and layers to be teased out from the piece, and I do hope it goes on beyond this two night event.

Philippa Hammond

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Bertolt Wrecked

Sussex Playwrights Reviews
Bertolt Wrecked

Cascade Creative Recovery drama collective
Direction from Speak Up! Act Out!
Original music by The Undergrowth Tea Party

‘A cornucopia of dystopian dysfunction. Sketches and music about the strange times we live in. In the style of Brecht and Weil.’

This performance was devised through a series of workshops over the last six months, and performed by a group of people who are in recovery.

We’re met outside by company members in makeup and masks, in an interactive, knowing fairground style – we all need disinfecting before we go in, so our reality is part of the show.

We’re somewhere around the 16th wave of Covid, in a near future where the strange new world we all had to get used to has become an even stranger New Normal.

It’s the first time I’m at an event in over a year, in a socially distanced audience, and my own apprehensions are mirrored and expanded by the work on stage. It’s all very meta.

A cast of ten perform glimpses of separated families, Draconian laws and the need for human interaction in a sometimes bleakly funny, often despairingly familiar near future, while a three piece live band sing ironic, dark songs in the corner of a cabaret nightclub.

Sometimes slower and quieter than it deserved, the show would benefit from a longer run, so cast and crew who’ve lived their own nightmares, and together are dealing with this one, too, can get into the swing of it, pick up the pace and the punch.

All the best to this charity, Cascade Creative Recovery. Recovery community space and cafe to connect people up with each other, signpost services relevant to maintaining recovery and organise creative projects and events.

More at https://www.facebook.com/CascadeCreativeRecovery

Philippa Hammond

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Clean – The Musical

Sussex Playwrights Reviews

Clean – The Musical
Different Theatre

Tasha’s in Brighton in the middle of the Covid pandemic, sorting her late mother’s things. She stumbles across her mother’s research on the history of the women of Brighton’s laundries – and their stories open up over three centuries, told to us by the women themselves.

The show first stepped out in 2019, winning Best New Play at the Brighton Fringe.

It began as a promenade piece in a lovely garden on the site of a laundry, and now it’s flowered out to a good two hours, newly developed for the strange new world of 2021.

It’s interwoven with a score of fourteen captivating solo and choral songs with that 60s & 70s folky protest vibe, book and lyrics by Sam Chittenden and music by Simon Scardinelli.

Blending folk, musical theatre and operatic voices, it’s an intimate show featuring seven actor/singers, some playing instruments too, plus two musicians.

The playing and singing’s gorgeous, with spine-tingling harmonies and solo performances, from raw to roar, and the natural stage and organ loft used to great advantage.

The venue enfolds us and looks terrific, a white linen-draped church, all characterful period detail. In Delphine du Barry’s design, clothes and sheets are strung across and round the space, each chair with its own label dedicated to a suffragette, and the costumes blending the iconic purple and green pallette of the suffragette movement.

The stories and histories each character shares are a revelation – there was a smallpox epidemic in Brighton in 1950. And an earlier typhoid outbreak. And so many laundries employing so many women, their sites now houses. And Sainsbury’s.

The piece flits through time – slipping through layers of time in the same place is a Chittenden motif and this new Covid-informed update has new resonance, connecting today’s front page themes of pandemics, women’s rights, women’s voices. Then and now.

Although they seldom interact, the characters are still connected together in work, refuges, campaigning and family ties through girlhood, motherhood, marriage, new independence, menopause. Each character is a compelling solo performance rather than interacting with the women of other times, their tales interweaving and echoing each other.

The men they conjure in their testimonies are uniformly awful; threatening and violent, emotionally unavailable, dismissive and discarding. It is a bleakly resigned view of relationships; and I wonder if there were any tales of supportive, unconditional love out there to be gathered into these experiences?

The show weaves rage and grief, tenderness and community spirit – and the occasional flash of fun.

It’s evolved – and there’s a sense that it could evolve again, perhaps adapting to a huge space and huge cast. It will be intriguing to see where it goes next.

The Brighton Theatre community is here today, and I spoke with more friends, both real life and new from Zoom, this afternoon than I have done in over a year, sharing our own ‘what a year’ stories before and after the event. Which just feels so right for this show.

Philippa Hammond

https://www.facebook.com/cleanthemusical/

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Rebel Boob

Sussex Playwrights Reviews

Rebel Boob
Speak Up! Act Out!
Director Angela El-Zeind
Choreography Katie Dale-Everett

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK with one woman diagnosed every ten minutes. And around 350 men a year, too.

Eight out of ten are not warned about the possibility of developing long-term anxiety, depression and other mental health issues.

This week, rage about the way gynaecology submits women to extreme pain without anaesthetic has taken centre stage, so this topic feels so much a part of the conversation right now.

This piece of verbatim theatre is based on interviews with survivors, some of whom were with us in the audience tonight.

Three women tell their stories, each dipping into testimonies that plunge us into some dark places, from the in-shower oh-crap moment to glimpses of the realities of the treatments.

We begin at the moment of diagnosis, a professional voice droning on – but it’s overtaken by the thundering heart, the wooshing in the ears, she’s falling, twisting, caught in a tornado.

Yet there’s joy and positivity too, glimpses of new beginnings, relationships strengthening, and the sense of a second chance to seize the day.

And a fun moment – an unexpected, brightly contrasted piece of audience participation that’s very cleverly popped in just where it’s needed.

The show’s performed by an assured trio;
Chess Dillon-Reams’ fluid dancer brings a powerful glow, Aurea Williamson is all restrained grace and compassion and director Angela El-Zeind delivers a performance of poise and authority.

It’s staged very simply, a few seating blocks and spotlights, with slides flitting on and off screen and audio snippets from the interviews, monologues and dance and physical theatre pieces interweaving together.

Like the survivors it celebrates, this compelling, frank and emotionally captivating piece will go on to new directions, telling more stories and spreading the word.

(PS: Do your checks, and go for your scans)

Philippa Hammond