Apart from an unresolved puzzle over who or what Orpheus is, Pilot Theatre’s decision to focus A Song for Ella Grey on a group of close-knit friends does justice to David Almond’s book that his own solo play script never could.
It’s time for Ella Grey at Northern Stage. Or, for those of us with long enough memories, Ella Grey round two. For those of us with long enough memories, this is in fact the second time Northern Stage has produced an adaptation of David Almond’s young adult novel for the stage. Seven years ago they did a solo play, written by David Almond himself and directed by then artistic director Lorne Campbell. That came hot off the heels of the publication and acclaim of the original book (not to mention a successful adaptation of another David Almond story over at Live Theatre), but wasn’t one of the most memorable ones. In retrospect, I think this vision was what I call “over-conceptualised” – an abstract staging of what’s already an abstract story, which ended up confusing everybody.
But … Pilot Theatre aren’t giving up that easily, and now they’re having a go. And if anyone’s going to do this right, it’s Pilot Theatre, who’s discovered they’re very good at doing adaptations of young adult novels. This time, it’s Zoe Cooper doing the adaptation – her biggest success to date is probably Jess and Joe Forever. The most obvious change from the original play? It’s gone from a solo play to an ensemble of five. This, I think, goes a long way to addressing two weaknesses of the original play.
It was an unusual decision for the New Vic’s Christmas production to emulate a ballet story close to the original ballet. But a couple of audacious decisions makes The Nutcracker one of their most successful Christmas productions.
One sign that the New Vic does something right with its Christmas production: there’s so much demand it runs to the end of January. That’s also convenient for me because it’s something on my calendar in an otherwise empty month. Catching The Nutcracker at the end of its run, I was hearing a lot of praise, but there was a difference with Theresa Heskins’s latest winter play. Usually there’s a substantially different angle on the source material clear from the outset. This time, it’s not so obvious. There’s still ballet – in fact, in order to have an ensemble who can do the a ballet needed it’s almost entirely a new cast. The original music by Tchaikovsky has been kept. Is this not just a repeat of the famous ballet piece?
Not really. This piece can perhaps be described as how The Nutcracker would have been written as a theatre piece with ballet in, as opposed to a pure ballet production. Most ballet productions have plenty of set pieces dances, with the greatest ones having legendary music. But as far as the storyline is concerned … it doesn’t half go on a bit. We all love the tunes of the Arabian Dance, Russian Dance, Chinese Dance, Dance of the Reed Flutes and Waltz of the Flowers, but it’s a guaranteed fail of the “get on with it test”. And some bits of the story in act one are just … weird. Including, for some reason, a battle between gingerbread men and the terrible evil mouse queen. Theresa Heskins respond to these two challenges with two audacious decisions – and they pay off.
Firstly, the weird mouse battle. The easy and safe solution is to just cut it. Heskins not only keeps it, but ups its prominence in the story. You might think that nobody’s going to buy into a story where the villain is a mouse, but we’re in land where everything in made of confectionery. Remember, those little buggers eat everything. The first mention of the mouse queen is in the real-world opening scene, where Uncle Drosselmeyer tells the tall tale of the mouse queen’s threat to the sugar plum fairy. The setting is now an unsettled family forced to relocate by war (a nod to Ukraine families currently in Stoke), and Marie has an older sister who died, but other than that, the Act I story is reasonably faithful to the Act I of the ballet.
So it’s the moment we’ve been building up to. Who do a rate the highest out of everything I’ve seen this year. Most of the time, you can get away with saying “Didn’t they all do well?”, but not here. I have to pick a some winners. Now I have to get really really choosy.
I know there has been some grumbling over “best of” lists being dominated by London. I even sometimes get touted as an alternative to London-centric lists. But please remember this is only a bit of fun. This is a very arbitrary list that is limited to what I saw. North-east theatre and festival fringes feature heavily, but what I get to consider – along with what goes with my own personal tastes – is very heavily influenced by luck. So try not to take this too seriously. Unless you win, in which case you’re welcome to take it very very seriously indeed.
Before we start, a reminder of a couple of rules that have a notable effect here. Things I saw in a previous year are generally not eligible in any subsequent years they perform; this is to avoid have these listings being dominated by the same plays give newer works a fair chance. So one notable omission from this list is Gerry and Sewell. I might have counted the upscaled version at Live Theatre as fresh play under different circumstances, but they got more than enough acclaim in last year’s awards and it’s time to give someone else their moment. The other reminder is that I heavily relax conflict of interest rules here. I have a principle when reviewing that if I’m working sufficiently close to someone that I wouldn’t be comfortable writing a bad review, it would not be appropriate to write any kind of review. But if I thought it was good, you may get recognition here. If you’re wondering if I have anyone in mind, you’ll just have to read this to find out.
The only thing I’ve done differently this year is to announce best individual performances separately. As this list is something that probably means the most to someone, and noting that there were far more people worthy of recognition than the 2-3 allowed in this article, I did a separate list with a top eight. You can read that now. Other than that, let’s go. And as always, we start on Boxing Day with …
Best New Writing:
Most of the time, a great production comes down to the performance, and cannot easily be transferred to another company. For this, I’m looking for the strength in the script. A good production might help you demonstrate how good the script is, but I’m looking for something you could transfer to another competent group of actors and get the same.
In third place … well, it’s open to debate whether this should count as new writing. I remember whole scenes of this play as a sub-plot of Alan Ayckbourn’s Surprises in 2012. But I always thought the theme of the sub-plot had the most potential and could have been made a play in its own right. That’s exactly what Ayckbourn has done, and Constant Companions is an excellent play with a very believable depiction of a near-future of how emotions in robots evolve to mimic those of humans. Given how quiet the Stephen Joseph Theatre has been over the origins of this play, I can’t help thinking they’re embarrassed by it. If that’s the case, don’t be – it doesn’t matter what the journey was if you have something to be proud of at the end.
I’m giving second place to Surfing the Holyland. Although Erin Hunter’s solo play is written for herself and is very much her own story, the real strength of the play is understanding the complex society that is Israel. It does not take a side in the ongoing war everybody talks about, save how many people are scared of it and others are radicalised by it, but a much stronger theme is the marked divide between a devout religious Israel and laid-back and secular Israel, plus many pieces in this jigsaw. We should not expect plays set in other countries to be set out a single issue discussed by the rest of the world – nobody, for example, demands that every play set in America in the 1960s is about Vietnam. But in an arts world that frequently gets absurdly judgement, it’s good to have something that tries to understand more and judge less.
But first place was something that stood out as a clear winner in the opening minutes. Ikaria begins with a nervous first encounter of Simon and Mia. A lesser writer would have gone for clunky exposition or shoehorned profound observations of twenty-somethings; instead, we have some very convincing (and very difficult to write) awkward exchanging of two people tentatively working out if they are going to be friends or something more. But it’s sadly not just a blossoming love story – the few hints we get of Simon’s troubled past warn us that this might not end well. Instead of Mia rescuing Simon from the darkness, he threatens of engulf her in it too, for it’s not just one person who suffers from depression, but also those closest to him trying – and in this case failing – to protect him from himself. I don’t know how Phillipa Lawford did this; some writers base everything on research, other just go ahead and write characters how they’d expect them to behave. Either way, it was utterly convincing, if a a very tough play to watch.
Phew, we’re at the end. What’s that? “Wait a second Chris, you haven’t finished the Edinburgh Fringe roundup yet.” Oh shut up. But apart from that, three plays from three different venues to close the year. Let’s get to it.
Three Acts of Love:
The conclusion to Live Theatre’s 50th anniversary season is a compilation piece of three writers on a theme. This may seem like a safe bet – it takes the pressure off one script making or breaking an entire production – but this can backfire. Setting briefs for writers can be risky; tie their hands too much, and they end up forcing ideas that don’t work out. The biggest pitfall, however, is how the stories are presented collectively. Do it right and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But get the concept wrong and you will regret it. Results vary, but in all the time I’ve done this blog, Live Theatre’s worst-reviewed play was a compilation one on the theme of Utopia. Don’t underestimate the stakes.
So my first reaction to Three Acts of Love is how much I liked the treatment of the production as a whole. The publicity implied this would be three monologues; however, in each of the stories, the other two actors provided supporting roles for the main character. The other common theme working through the stories was on-stage live music from Me Lost Me. That only works if the style of the musician suits the moods of the stories, but it works here. I don’t know in what order the decisions were made here – how much the co-directors set a brief in advance and how much was reacting to the scripts they were given – but Jack McNamara and Bex Bowser’s vision comes off well.
As you may have guessed, I’ve seen that 2024 is fast approaching and I’m in a panic. So I’ve been catching up with a lot of reviews. Now it’s time to get everything about Edinburgh Fringe in one place. And if you’re in a hurry, I can give you the usual disclaimer: you will find hardly anything here that I haven’t already written in my live coverage. On the other hand, everything you find here will be in a more sensible order and more concise.
Edinburgh Fringe 2022 had a big preamble. It was the first proper-scale fringe since the lurgi, and though the relaunch was ultimately a success, it was messy. This time round, most of the arguments have been smoothed over. The Fringe App and Fringe Central are back, the arguments over favouritism for bigger acts and bigger media have been de-escalated, talk of the Big Four doing a breakaway is getting quieter – and after worries of the fringe growing and growing and growing past the point of sustainability, 2023’s size was about the same as 2022. (For the details of what this meant, see the live coverage on the 28th August, 8.30 p.m.)
The only real controversy has been around cancel culture. I am very against cancel culture regardless of which side is under fire, although it’s fair to say that what happened in 2023 is minor compared to the disgraceful events of 2014 when people were targetted for what they were rather than what they said. First there was the business with Joanna Cherry at The Stand – but I guess it was only a matter of time before somebody resorted to the Law, she did, and she got her way. Then there was Graham Linehan at Leith Arches. This one I’m a little less sympathetic over. Comedy unleashed has a track record of provoking outrage for the sake of it, and Graham Linehan’s behaviour off-stage has such sheer nastiness I would not be comfortable letting him near workers in any venue I was responsible for. But Leith Arches didn’t say “No, you have a track record of harassing trans people”, they said “You, you don’t share our values”, which, at the very least, puts on you thin ice over breach of contract. No legal action came of that, but with all the allegations currently surfacing around Russell Brand, maybe we should worry less about who has opinions we don’t agree with, and more about what’s actually threatens the safety of other people at the venue. (See live coverage on 18th August for more details on my thoughts.)
There was also some controversy over using the building currently used as Greenside Infirmary Street as a year-round Edinburgh Fringe base. But that situation has moved on and I’ll get back to this in coverage for next year’s fringe.
I’m making a small change to my annual awards this year. It’s occurred to me that the list that probably means to most to individuals is best individual performance. Unlike plays, where I have about a hundred each year vying for attention, the list of actors goes into hundreds and it gets really competitive. With categories having a maximum of top three, I found myself leaving out people deserving of recognition. So this year I’m going up to a top eight, which will be announced in the run up to Christmas.
Other than that, rules are the same. This category is for best performance, not best actor. A performance can only be as good as the part. You need a good script and a good production to to be in the running. But if you do have a good production and good script, some excellent acting might secure the place on the list.
Plenty of plays have talked about eating disorders, or eating disordered pushed on by ruthless marketing, so Kate Sumpter hit upon the idea of the equivalent mindset for exercise addiction. Playing a “Spin instructor” in a “spin studio”, the play does get bit confusing as to whether this is a conventional gym or one of these more modern remote online things. Actually, it’s neither of those, and the play gets a lot more surrealistic that what it first seems, but since this is coming to the Arcola next month I won’t give away any more spoilers and leave you to find out yourself if you’re near enough to London.
More of a catchup now. I split my fringe plays into two lots, with the last one covering venues other than The Laurels. But I have been spending a lot of time at The Laurels this year, and not just because I had a play on there. I really like The Laurels’ artistic ethos. There is some great stuff going on in theatres over in Newcastle, but in terms of subject matter and style, it is getting a bit sameish. But pretty much everything I’ve seen at The Laurels has been different. And yes, a more inclusive policy means a high risk of a play that turns out to be a complete turkey. But so far, this hasn’t happened.
However, this list is going to be considerably shorter than what I’ve seen for two reasons. I was one of three plays timed around Halloween in what became an unofficial Tyneside Horrorfest. As such, I’m viewing Charles Dexter Ward and The Haunting as part of my team. Also, whilst I’m happen to write reviews of plays at Jamie Eastlake’s theatre, it would not be appropriate to review plays he is artistically involved in. (Producer is OK.) This all comes back to my base rule: if I would not be comfortable writing a bad review of your play, it is not appropriate to write any kind of review. Those rules are relaxed outside of the review section, but we’ll get on to that later.
So this leaves four to catch up on, and we’re going back a bit. But better late than never, here we go.
The Club – a CIU story
With The Laurels located in a former Working Men’s Club, it is quite fitting that one of the main productions of the venue should be set in an actual working men’s club. Rather use the stage, the play quite sensibly uses one of the bar rooms of the venue, with retro touches such as the fines in the swear box – hey, it’s the 1970s, 50p is a lot of money. It’s also, I believe, the largest cast play to date at the Laurels. What might come as a surprise is the the cast has an even male/female split – but only if you’re not up to speed on the history of working men’s clubs. In spite of the name, for most of their history working men’s clubs have been a destination of choice for both men and women. Not always so with membership. This is one of the many clubs where the women could only be associate members. This will go on to be the dominant theme of the play.
We begin with a celebration. Suzie is the first person ever from this town to have been accepted at Cambridge. It’s through this lens that we see how different the two worlds are. For Suzie, there’s a whole new life being opened up for her; for her older sister, the expectation is to just have kids, something she’s quite content with. Being the 1970s, it also passes without comment that the local WMC sex pest is policed by warning the young women not to end up alone with him (instead of, you know, telling him not to be a sex pest). What doesn’t pass without comment, however, is just how much of the menial work falls to the women – but without being full members they don’t get a say in how the club runs.
Now let’s catch up with Buxton Fringe. And apologies for anyone waiting. Unlike Brighton and Edinburgh, I don’t do live coverage of Buxton, meaning that anyone wondering what I thought of Buxton fringe plays has to wait for the roundup. You also need to wait for any news of what went on in Buxton, although this time the news is quite straightforward.
Whilst Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe still have ongoing controversies/shitshows, Buxton Fringe has been pretty much free to get on with business as usual. There has been on ongoing issue over lack of small spaces – this year the addition of the Rotunda Squeak seems to have resolved that. The main problem in 2022, however, was audience numbers not recovering as fast as audience numbers. I haven’t seen any official figures, but based on partial figures from some individual venues, my own observations, and the general mood, it looks like audience numbers have made a proper recovery now.
The other thing notable about Buxton 2023 was lot of rain. Which make a change of lots of heat from last year. Never mind, nothing we can do about that.
For once, we can go straight through the preamble, say all is well, and get on to the reviews.
Pick of the fringe:
This is a bit different from normal picks. Normally, I restrict pick of the fringe to theatre – and if there’s anything I love in comedy or elsewhere, it goes into honourable mention. However, this time round, most of my favourites weren’t theatre. (Some might have been counted as theatre in the programme, but I have a long-standing rule of reviewing based on what I think counts as theatre.) So, for once, I’m relaxing the rules and here’s a pick of the fringe of Buxton Fringe theatre and theatrish.
Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales
P J Vickers took two productions to Buxton Fringe this year. Only one of them was going to the Edinburgh Fringe, with this one being the side project. It does what it says on the tin: reciting the words of two of Oscar Wilde’s short stories to a piano accompaniment; and it was lovely. Both stories – indeed the overall collection published in 1888 – are fantasy stories with an over-arching theme of kindness. But there’s a cynical streak too. The Happy Prince, the best known tale of the collection, is about a gold/jewel-laden sentient statue over an extravagant Palace where the rest of the city lives in poverty. The Nightingale and the Rose has the extreme sacrifice a nightingale makes to get a red rose for a youth to win the heart of the professor’s daughter – but the moral of the story turns out to be that if the love of your life is demanding an extremely specific gift that you have no realistic chance of acquiring in the short time available, you should probably cut your losses and find somebody less petty and materialistic instead.
Storytelling Oscar Wilde is a pretty straightforward thing to do: good delivery of words, and condensing the story to keep up the pace without causing it to stop making sense – do those two things well and you can’t really go wrong. This is done here. But it’s the musical touch which makes this stand out. Played by David Collins, it is only played in brief passages, usually subtle. In fact, between the understated music and the strength of both the test and the delivery, you don’t consciously notice when the music has begun and stopped – but that adds to the experience.
Even with the unusual touch of the live accompaniment, this was one of the safest bets at Buxton Fringe, but it deliver exactly what it promises.
Screech
Tuh, when are Three’s Company ever going to get their act together with their podcast? Every time I sit down and listen to an episode, they can’t make it more than two minutes in before being interrupted by an adventure. Now they do an episode to a live audience, and surely they’re not going to be distracted this time? But, no, somebody in a mask has to keep making phone calls threatening to crop them all into tiny pieces. You know what, I don’t think they’re ever going to get round to their advice on funding.
Seriously, Three’s Company Adventure Department is a project than began in 2020 when there wasn’t much else to do. Tom Crawshaw and Yaz Al-Shaater were joined by semi-retired founder-member Michael Grady-Hall for a set of comedy audio plays, where their serious podcast about making fringe theatre keeps getting interrupted by an adventure. Every episode is a different genre and basically parodies every story in that genre. This rare edition is an episode before a live audience, and is a parody of every slasher flick, featuring guest star Rob Rouse. Expect called of “Let’s play a game” to be answered with enthusiastic suggestions for Twister and/or Trivial Pursuit and confusion over Saw and See-Saw. Plus of course an urgent clarification that the trope of mental patients escaping hospitals is misleading, and whilst some people are a danger to others is it is irresponsible to make a generalisation that all neurodivergent people are mass murders. But, hey, it’s not irresponsible if it’s true. [Ominous theme, close in on my sinister eyes.]
Rob Rouse plays the guest star in this for whoever the equivalent of Ghostface/Jigsaw/Kurger/Vorhees is. I believe this was a raffle prize, but if the audience could have picked anybody, he’d surely have been first choice, because Rob Rouse was an absolute superstar in the role.
One small snag over this performance is that the skit is over in about 30 minutes – the remainder of the time was the slightly more tedious process of re-recording the bits that didn’t pick up the first this round whilst trying to reproduce the audience laughs. But this really a gathering/celebration of the fanbase first and a comedy act second. And it was great to finally get us all together. Much of the online theatre created in the infamous fringe season of 2020 never got an audience, and it’s great that this one did.
Fugee
Now, this is a big blast from the past. It’s rare for a play I’ve seen before to slip past my radar, but this one rang a bell and I had to look up when it last play at Buxton: 2011, the year before I started doing reviews. But you’d be forgiven for assuming it was written for 2023. Anti-immigrant sentiment certain existed twelve years ago, but a panic leading to solutions as extreme as Rwanda was unimaginable. This, I assume, is why Shadow Syndicate has chosen to revive this from their back catalogue.
Fugee was written as part of National Theatre Connections, to be performed in youth theatre groups all over the country. One obvious challenge about a play set in a centre for teenage refugees over all nationalities is a heavily multi-racial which most youth groups are mostly white, but Abi Morgan’s script does have an unconventionally direct solution to this that works quite well. The key character in this is Kojo, who is fleeing from a militia that enrolled him as a child soldier. The centre itself is a lifeline, both camaraderie of other refugees and supportive managers. The laws, on paper, seem reasonable. But Kojo’s enemies are the jobworths form outside, looking for any opportunity they can to make someone else’s life worse. (Former Home Office employee here, I can attest these people exist.)
For obvious reasons, this is a different cast from twelve years ago, but Shadow Syndicate has been consistently good with its production values and this is no exception. In fact, now is a good time to credit Shadow Syndicate for avoiding something many youth groups fall foul of: becoming the playground of the youth group leader. Across most theatre there are checks and balances one way or another. Directors in adult amateur theatre who make poor decisions will eventually fall foul of walkouts or mutinies. That might not apply in professional theatre where you are paid to do what the director says – but a bad professional director will still be punished at the box office. Neither of those failsafes apply to youth theatre. I’m not saying there are a many bad youth theatre directors, but I’ve seen numerous cases of otherwise decent directors putting on weak scripts of their own, or making weird directorial decisions in otherwise solid productions. They can do this because the kids aren’t experienced enough to talk back; and the audience is mostly friends and family, there for the support first and decent directing a long way second.
That does not apply to Buxton Fringe though. All groups (especially non-local groups) have to earn their audience. Perhaps this is the incentive Shadow Syndicate needed, or maybe they’re just the gropu who never settle for “Didn’t they all try hard”. Either way, Fugee is another production with high production values that the rest of the fringe a run for its money.
St. George and other stories
A small liberty with the title here. A more accurate title would be “other story” as a singular. It’s two stories from Dylan Howells and Joe Sellman-Leava, both true (or truish) stories they there were a part of.
We open with Dylan’s story. Dylan is the tech lead at Underground Venues, and this story started off as a more rehearsed version of what I believe was previously a popular anecdote told at the bar. This involves a dinner party with a rare visit from an brother – notorious for outlandish boasts – making an even bigger boast than usual on his visit to Amsterdam. (And, as you have already guess, this visit did not involve museums or galleries.) As any well-crafted anecdote does, it crescendos to a climax of the lengths he takes to prove his latest outlandish story true.
It’s fair to say that Dylan’s short story functions in part as a prelude to Joe’s longer story which, on its own, wouldn’t have filled up the usual hour slot. This, however, was a longer and deeper story. Now, this one, Joe admits, takes a few liberties on the details – the real story took place over a longer timeframe and not on April 23rd in various years. But the key part is his friendship with another boy at school, both of them semi-outsiders in one way or another. His idolises the mythical version of St. George; but as they approach school leaving a rift comes between in the form of an army career visit. Joe hasn’t forgiven them for Iraq and sees these recruitment drives as exploitative; his friend, however, sees the army as his chance to do something with his life he can be proud of.
There’s no shortage of plays on the fringe circuit which are essentially artists talking about themselves – and I swear in 2023 there’s been a lot more. Sometimes it’s justified, because some people have amazing stories to share; others are textbook offenders of literal “main character syndrome” who consider their ordinary lives to be uniquely deep and profound. But it’s not often you see one fo these stories give so much weight to someone other then yourself. And there’s no battle of self-justification here. Joe respects the decision of his friend that he would never have made himself, and does not shy away from depicting is friend’s outlook as strongly as his own. Not all stories actors tell about themselves can work this way, but a lot more could and should. I applaud Joe Sellman-Leava for doing it this way.
Honourable mention:
Now for the rest of the review. One small housekeeping announcement is that Dirty Scrabble is not eligible for a review, because I ended up being in dictionary corner for that – and, as far as I can tell, this is a role in the show specifically created for my when I’m around. We’ll just have to wait for someone else to critique my toilet humour. Also, in common with previous years, I don’t review stand-up comedy – I wouldn’t know where to start.
Those disclaimers established, we have:
97+
The title might not mean much to some people; for anyone affected by the issue, it certainly does. 97 is the number of deaths from the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989, but for those who lived the trauma goes on. Tom Cain produced this play in collaboration with the Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance, and it shows. If the title seems familiar, there was a very successful verbatim play done a few years back called The 56, which covered a similar story of the Bradford City Stadium fire. The obvious difference between the two, of course, is that nobody tried to shift the blame for that disaster. For Hillsborough, the cover-up and victim-blaming is just as big a deal as the disaster itself.
Unlike The 56, this play is set decades later, for two good reasons. Firstly, this play has a heavy emphasis on the long-term trauma of the survivors entering middle age. Secondly, it is 2012, the start of the enquiry that will eventually exonerate the Liverpool fans. Although for John, it may as well still be 1989. His whole life is still dominated by Hillsborough. He was in the middle of the crush and still has nightmares about it. When he’s not doing that, he’s seething about the subsequently vilification by The Sun. Nothing his wife can do can calm this, but instead he meets Steve, another survivor (in his case one who saw the whole thing from the other end of the stadium). With someone like himself to talk to, Steve persuades him to give his story to the upcoming enquiry.
Hillsborough Survivors Support Alliance should be pleased with this, because if does a good job of concisely depicting both the terrible events of the day, and the trauma and anger felt decades later. What the play lacks, however, is any real feel of a narrative structure. The 56 did this by structuring the story into the party atmosphere of Bradford’s final game, the slow dawning something was wrong, through the worst of the fire, and then the recovery of survivors on the other side. The wouldn’t necessarily be the right approach here – after all, this intentionally has a big focus on later years. But it feels like it needs something. Is this the story of John finally opening up? If so, we need to begin the story when John has kept his memories to himself for decades. Or might this be a redemption story? John could be one of many people who lives for a day the Prime Minister officially apologises in the Commons – if that’s where the play ends. Or might you do both strands? Or both strands plus the strand of the day of the disaster? (This would be tricky but I reckon doable.)
I get the impression that a lot of plays based on the testimony of real people struggle with narrative structure because the author wants to pack is as much as possible from real testimonies. That is understandable, but this usually comes at the expense of a story. You cover all the testimonies you like in a seminar, but a play is an opportunity to understand what an individual goes through. In doing so, you might not be able to get as many survivors’ voices on stage, but that’s okay, because you are using a play to do what a seminar can’t. That’s a human face, and Tom Cain, who clearly knows his stuff, shouldn’t be afraid of pulling all the stops for that.
Dark Horse
In common with an earlier review, this act has the challenge of doing a play that’s a little too short for a fringe time-slot. The Yellow Bird is a short Tennessee Williams story; it is preceded by their original play Dark Horse.
First, Dark Horse. This is a clever concept where a woman at a group therapy meeting. It’s not quiet clear whether this is alcoholics anonymous or some other behavioural problem. When she opens up and goes into her story, it first seems like she was in a Bonnie and Clyde-style relationship – until the story gets familiar. It is, in fact, a retelling of Delilah’s story from Samson and Delilah. The narrative does have echoes of Tennessee Williams’s style, and I did like the way this was slowly build up to let the penny drop in your own time. However, I do feel this needed a decision on what sort of Delilah is in this story. Is this a scheming and manipulative Delilah as depicted in the Bible? Or is she misunderstood and her own side of the story is different from the Old Testament would have you believe?
The Yellow Bird is the more polished of the two. This is the story of Alma, the the daughter of a strict Reverend. She horrifies her parents by being unmarried at 25, not getting together with nice young men at church picnics, and instead finding comfort as a wallflower. It’s only after an outburst in church that she discovers that the real Alma is not what her father wants her to be, and she’s prepared to tear up her life to become her own liberated self.
The text of the prose translates well into the narration of Alma. I hadn’t realised, but unlike most of Tennessee Williams’s best known works, this is a short story rather than play. The prose translates to monologues very well, and the fact I assumed it was directly his script is credit to Karran Collings’s adaptation. In fact, the production as a whole was decent, with one exception: the set was far too congested for a fringe-scale stage. I sometimes saw the actors struggle to navigate the set. In addition, there were a fair number of scene changes, and the gaps the create added up and broke the flow. It is almost always better to keep things basic. Use no more set than you need, and if you must have scene changes, make them as fast and slick as you can.
Other than that, I good start from a group who I believe are new to Buxton Fringe. Hopefully this first foray will show what worked and what didn’t, and any group who learns from this can build on it and keep coming back better.
Bibby Dinosaur
Dave Bibby’s comedy routine can best be summarised as what was supposed to have been a meticulously performed one-man Jurassic Park – but then along came a kid and Dave didn’t have time to plan that sort of show any more. But don’t worry – maybe with the help of the audience we can complete this after all.
It’s a very interactive show – no-one gets shown up, but there’s a clipboard passed round with lines that may or may not have been in the original Spielberg film. Interspersed with this, however, are accounts of being a comedian also bringing up a baby son, soon to be a toddler son. As with most comedy giving real-life events, some caution should be paid and anecdotes may have been embellished. However, a strong contender for wholesome moment of the year is Bibby’s dinosaur-obsessed child playing the part of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Also, if your first teenage crush was Ellie Satler but you’re now married, Dave Bibby might have the solution for you.)
However, you might notice as we approach the end of the hour that we’re not even halfway through the film yet. Without giving too much of a spoiler, there’s one thing worse for your arts career than bring up one kid, and you don’t need to be Sherlock to guess what it is. It looks like Dave Bibby’s one-man Jurassic Park will never be finished, unless …well, it’ll make sense when you need it.
This is in the comedy category for both Buxton and Edinburgh, and firmly belongs there, so don’t expect any tightly-directed re-enactment, but that’s not the point. It’s ultimately a celebration of how losing your creative time to family time is worth it. For a show based on a film where dinosaurs eat people, it’s one of the loveliest shows out there.
Start Warts! A new hip!
Locally based REC Youth Theatre are regulars at Buxton Fringe (and even once had a Tom Crawshaw script written for them), but we do occasionally get REC Adults taking part. ReZolution thetre company, I understand, is an off-shoot of former REC Youths doing their own thing. And we go to St. Biddulph’s Amateur Dramatic Society’s bold reimagining of Star Wars, a New Hope. Wait a second, just got a letter from George Lucas’s solicitor. Apparently you can’t do that. Never mind, apparently it’s okay if you do no more than 10% of each scene. And change the title a bit. You have probably already guessed what follows, but St. Biddulph’s ability to put on a play roughly matches their ability to understand intellectual property law.
The challenge? Plays about putting on plays is one of the most over-used tropes in theatre. The market is currently sewn up by a whole The Play That Goes Wrong franchise; before then it was dominated by the legendary Noises Off. It’s all very well writing in collapsing scenery and forgotten lines, but farces are always more memorable if you have believable characters in these ridiculous situations. I admit Noises Off and The Play That Goes Wrong are both repeat offenders for sacrificing plausible characterisation for a few laughs (and, let’s be honest, either of them wave an Oliver/Tony in my face and go “This chap says I’m right”), but I maintain that if you want to stand out, you needed something more.
Start Warts! does move some moves in this section, but could go further. One way of marking your individuality is by making the characters in the play fundamental to how the play-within-a-play goes. One of my favourite moments was one of the lads who’s hoping the grant they’ve just received can be used to cast professionals, specifically Margot Robbie (notable as, in his words “the one who takes her clothes off in The Wolf of Wall Street”). Surely this is begging for a sub-plot where he tries and fails to pull every female in the society. Not saying the whole play should revolve around this, but the more character traits to drive the story, the better. Another thing I really liked was the use of the window at the back of the hall going through into a green room, where chaos on state was matches with chaos backstage. But that was only used a little towards the end – lots could have been done with this.
But – let’s keep things in proportion. This is trying to be the next Noises Off, it’s meant to be a fun piece for both the performers and the people watching, and on that front I’ve no complaints. And, credit where it is due, any kind of farce is hard to sustain. It takes a lot of planning and or-ordination to organise all the chaos, and you need a cost with a lot of energy to keep up the pace, and both of those were delivered in spades. Not a bad start from these alumni of a local youth group, but more focus on characterisation pays off – even for this kind of comedy.
Seven and a Half Years
This was one of the most ambitious performance I saw at Buxton Fringe. Not because it’s a heavy multimedia play including numerous bit of live music – after all, Mark Glentworth is a professional musician – but because the subject material is not an easy thing to make work as a story. This is a personal story of his own live: following a breakdown (in spite of having a very successfu musical career), he spent seven and a half years holed up in his home, leaving only once a day to go to the same corner shop to buy a daily sandwich.
Having previously lauded Joe Sellman-Leava for making a story he was in not about himself, you might be wondering if this is an example of main character syndrome I’ve frequently complained about. Is this is one the those trivial incidents over-analysed and made more important than it really is? The answer here is an unequivocal no. Something that causes you to be a recluse to the extreme for three quarters of a decade is about as big a deal as you can get. And to have progressed in real life from a recluse to someone about to talk so frankly about this past now is a big personal milestone.
The other challenge, however, is how to make a story out of this. Real life rarely gives you a convenient narrative structure, and here we got an obvious problem. By its very nature, in the seven and a half years Glentworth stays at home … not a lot happens. Actually explaining why a mental breakdown makes you do what you is very difficult, and very abstract. But what I though would have been a good point of reference was the other people in his life over this time. In particular: what was happening with his wife and kids over this time? We didn’t hear much about that. There’s always two stories with any kind of mental breakdown: one is the effect on you directly, the other is the effect on the people who care for you. But that could have been a good point of reference with the outside world. How much did they try to help? Or did they realise there was nothing they could do? Was there rent or mortgage for this home, and if so who was paying it?
There’s one difficulty to doing it this way – when you’re writing about real life, writing about the personal feelings of those you know as opposed to yourself is a sensitive subject. Without knowing the details, I can’t say how viable this would be. But my feeling is that if possible, bite the bullet and do it – even if it means some tricky conversations on what to include and what to leave out. The musical setting is fitting though, and fits the moods swings required of the story; the observations of recovering physical health after all this time is also a good sign off. A lot of credit for having the courage to tell this story – good luck if you want to include the stories of those around you.
Nation
Now for the other performance from P J Vickers. The Oscar Wilde stories were well executed but worked to a tried and tested format. This is a an original play, and one of the biggest gambles taken with new writing. But he won the Buxton Fringe new Writing award last year, so he’s well placed to take this on.
This is more storytelling than a conventional play – you could listen to this as an audio piece and have almost the same experience. Nevertheless, the story creates an in-depth portrait of the fringes of Parisian society. The narrator has left Britain, having needed to make himself scarce after some unspecified messy business, and proceeds to get himself into equally messy business in France. Not because he’s looking for trouble, as such – if anything, he’s getting into trouble for being a stickler for the rules. Especially traffic rules. His first job delivering leaflets falls through because he insists on following parking regulations, and he also gets into numerous scrapes through dogged insistence of rights of way at pedestrian crossings (something that French drivers are famously ambivalent over). On other rules, he’s seemingly more relaxed.
The narrator’s adventures, however, are only half of the story. The other half is life in a semi-underworld of France. Numerous characters come and go with little impact on the main story, but adding up to portray the society he’s wound up in. The setting for this is the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks, although to be honest it doesn’t make much difference – this is France, riots happen all the time, with perhaps the only difference is the Police being more paranoid and trigger-happy than normal, as befalls the fate of one associate. Other than that, there’s an air of chaotic normality, such as the local businesses boarding up their windows in advance of a protect they already know will be kicking off later.
I am obliged to mention that on the performance I was at, a bit of the story was skipped that apparently caused a key event later to not make sense. I know from experience it’s hard to avoid skipping your own text in hour-long monologues. However, there is a rule that if something happens in a play that’s important, you should make sure it’s mentioned twice (unless it’s obvious at the time it’s important). Otherwise, people who missed that bit get lost later. As such, I must advise that even when the script is delivered perfectly (and it should be it will be in time for Edinburgh), you do need to concentrate on this. So make sure you have a full-charged brain. Other than that, it’s a good piece of storytelling, where the real story isn’t the narrator’s story, but the numerous stories going on around him.
Things are Looking Up!
And finally, a musical production on the life of Cicely Courtneidge. Robert Hazle and Helena Northcote did two pieces, with the other one being about Noel Coward. Cicely Courtneidge is less well known today, but she was one of the longest-running performers on the stage and screen, starting off in her father’s music hall, landing her first West End role ages 16, and her total career spanned seventy-five years. Much of it was a partnership with her husband Jack Hulbert – the career also spanned screapes from the mob in America the touring with the armed forces during the war.
The majority of the show is the songs of Cicely Courtneidge. As a result, I do wonder whether theatre was the right category for this. Certainly as a musical tribute I have nothing to fault with the performance, and the talking between the performances was a lot more telling us about moments in her life rather than anything theatrical. And there’s a perfectly good reason to do it that way: when a performance is 80%+ devoted to musical numbers of a singer, it’s reasonable to decide there’s not enough time left in the spoken word part to do any acting.
But … this can be done. The performance I have in mind is My Friend Lester from back in 2015. Even though most of the performance was Billie Holliday and Lester Young’s greatest hits, the few bits of dialogue between the songs packed it a lot of emotion. I reckon the same could have been pulled off here if they’d been bold enough. One of the most memorable bits of her story was performing Take Me Back to Dear Old Blightly in 1945 where, mid-show, the new broke that Nazi Germany had finally surrendered, and she was draped in a Union Jack to finish the song. A touching story – but imagine how much more impact this would have had if a dramatisation had been put into the song.
Still, it’s fair to judge this on its own terms, and as a music tribute it does the job it set out to do, even if it was categorised as theatre. Should Hazle and Northcote wish to go down the theatre route, however, there’s a lot that could be done.
And that’s Buxton Fringe caught up on. Just three more articles to go and we’ve caught up.
Another catch-up of plays now, and this has been on the waiting list for a long time. Both in the round, and both close off-shoots of Northern Broadsides under Barrie Rutter. It’s a good report for one but an excellent report from the other.
The Card
Now, who remembers my review of Brassed Off last year? You probably don’t because it’s one of my less enthusiastic reviews. Fantastic film, great director, but let down by a script that couldn’t handle the transition from screen to stage. I know Conrad Nelson won’t agree with me, because this is the second time he’s directed this play, but the one observation I left it with was that Conrad Nelson did a the best job he could on integrating a brass band into a stage production. Maybe what we really needed was a script from his wife and main collaborator Deborah McAndrew. Well, we don’t have that, but we do have the next best thing: another adaptation featuring an integrated brass band, but this time penned by Deborah McAndrew herself. I guessed correctly: The Card lives up to its potential way beyond my expectations.
Time for a catch-up of all the things I’ve seen. I still have thing in the backlog as for as June, but I’m starting with some of the fringe-scale productions I’ve seen. For various reasons, I’ve seen quite a lot at The Laurels, but we begin with two at other venues – including one that isn’t normally a theatre venue at all.
The remarkable deliverances of Alice Thornton
This is one of the most unusual plays to review because this is this is part of a historial project. Alice Thornton is a historical figure of some interest, not so much for influence or status, but because – thanks to four books she wrote about herself – this is one the most detailed accounts we have of ordinary life in the 17th century. (It is thought her own reason for writing the books is her side of the story against what she called “slander”, but it accidentally become a valuable historical reference in the process.) The four books were once lost; two were found in the 1980s, and thanks to an academic team led by Cordelia Beattie, the other two books were located in 2018 and 2019, one of which was in the archives of Durham Cathedral where this play is now being performed. Most of this project has been around piecing things together and digitising the manuscripts, but Debbie Cannon is doing a side-project of a dramatisation of her life.
Debbie Cannon is a historian herself and knows her stuff inside out, but she’s not the only historian with an academic background to turn her hand to theatre. The recurring problem I’ve found is many of these historians know their stuff inside out, but don’t really understand how to do a dramatisation. As a result, there’s a lot of solo biopics around which are essentially a biography told in person and little more. Fortunately, we can count on Debbie Cannon’s past work of Green Knight. Nothing about the tale of Sir Gawain was changed, but she still used the information to create a Lady Bertilak very different from the original. This isn’t quite the same challenge – there’s a lot more facts known about Alice Thornton and therefore less room for imagination, and we don’t have a climax to a story like an Arthurian legend has. But she still pulls it off and creates a character that’s far more than another first-person biography.
One difference between this and typical biopic – more than necessity than choice – is that most of them are close to the end of the subject’s life looking back. Alice Thornton is known to have lived into her eighties, but her books focus or her earlier life. As a result, this takes place as Alice Thornton is preparing to attend the funeral of her husband. Her life so far have covered the entire period of the English Civil War and Commonwealth, but the rise and fall of Cromwell barely features other than her staunch support for the royals. Instead, as is usual for real life, it’s a very multi-threaded story cover a lot of details. We don’t actually know much about what the so-called slander actually was, let alone whether there was any truth in it, but we do know she ended up enemies with family member Ann Danby, who she sees as a right hussy (at least by the Puritanical standards of the 17th century).
The biggest impact of the play, however, isn’t she much what is said, but what isn’t said: life is cheap. Alice Thornton herself had numerous near misses, both accidents and diseases, but many people around her weren’t so fortunate, including most of her own children – and the subtext to this is how much this was accepted as completely normal. This, perhaps, goes a long way to explaining her religious devotion. One decision that must always be made in a monologue is who, if anyone, you are talking to. In this case, she is talking to God. The 17th century is a scary place, and the solace that everybody close to you who you lose must be a solace. Alice believes her own survival to be God’s place, although her faith in God’s plan’s works both ways. People who lost their lives in the civil war either got their just desserts or, in the case of Charles I, met a glorious end the way his maker intended.
The Remarkable Deliverances of Alice Thornton is a much more niche interest than Green Knight with its universal appeal, and as such it’s difficult to rate it alongside more mainstream solo plays. But within its niche, it’s done one of the best jobs I’ve seen of bringing a historical character to life. The lesson I would give for anybody wanted to do a historical biopic is to not be afraid to use imagination to fill in the gaps. Whilst I can understand why some writers would be reluctant not to commit to anything that’s proven to have happened – after all, some biopics take flagrant liberties – the approach struggles to create anything interesting that couldn’t have been done in a lecture. Debbie Cannon shows how you can stay very faithful to what we know but still create a person from a biography. A lot to be said for doing things this way.
Flip!
Now from the documented past to an all-too plausible vision of the near future. Anyone who’s well versed in the bizarre politics of social media creators will watch a lot of Racheal Ofori’s play and go “Yup, that figures.” I think it’s fair to say that not everybody will follow all of this, and if you have never heard of the horror that this the YouTube apology video, some key bits on the story might be lost of you. But on the plus side, you’ve never heard of the YouTube apology video.
Carleen and Crystal are aspiring influencers on “Wepipe”, presumably a fucticious equivalent of Youtube. It’s a mixture of being cool mates, doing sketches, and political discourse. If you’ve not kept up with social media discourse in real life (and honestly, if you’re not doing it, this isn’t a good time to start), you might have trouble keeping up with the details here – but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s all about saying whatever it is that gets out the most engagement, whether it’s saying something popular, or calling out another influencer for saying the wrong thing. But not too popular an influencer: it’s all a numbers game. You don’t want to set your followers on a rival influencer only for your rival’s to dogpile you. Carleen and Crystal aren’t the villains of the story, though; they are merely going along with what the algorithms want them to do.
Rachael Ofori isn’t the only playwright to take on the subject of social media influencers. Many of the themes are well-explored. Apart from the political spats, there’s the obsession with engagement stats overriding all other considerations, paid endorsements being passed off as regular chit-chat, one half of the duo being more popular than the other, and cynical interviews aimed at goading influencers into conflict with other influencers. However, what’s new is the rise of AI. In the story, Carleen and Crystal try out releasing material on a new social network called Flip, accepting some of the more sinister-sounding terms and conditions. What this means is that Flip can create content that appears to be yourself, but is actually just a computer impersonating you. But no, it’s not made possible by the onerous terms and conditions you signed – it happens because it’s the path of least resistance. You get a fee, you don’t have to do any work to create a video, and besides this is how everybody is doing it, Christ, how can you be so unreasonable to make even make a fuss over this? Even a year ago this plot might have been considered too far-fetched. Not any more.
Flip! is a very tech-heavy play – this might even be the record-breaker for Alphabetti. A tech-heavy theme is of course naturally suited to a tech-heavy performance; you probably could have done this play with a far simpler lighting and sound plot, but it wouldn’t have been the same. It’s not often i single out directors for praise – it’s usually hard to tell what’s down to the director and what’s down to the actors or crew – but Emily Aboud has clearly done a good job here. You don’t just need IT wizardry for something of this complexity – you also need to tightly choregraph the acting, as well as choose something which actually makes sense to the audience. Clever tech plots rarely compensate for a weak script but they do a lot to enhance a strong one.
This play was maybe a bit more niche that it needed to be; you need to be quite up to speech on social media politics to follow some parts of it. To give this a wider appeal, it might have helped to raise the stakes a bit – having got as far as imitating a social media star with AI, perhaps it could have escalated further with her influence ending on sale to the highest unsavoury bidder. Nevertheless, there were some bits more relatable to the luddites, such as the frustration of the conventional newsreaders that their story about social media isn’t going to be heard by anyone (with everybody who’s interested having already got their info on social media). I do hope they haven’t over-narrowed their appeal, but the strength here is for an audience who’s seen this unfold in real time. Last year Flip might have been dismissed as a fantasy. Next year, who knows?
Firstly, the weird mouse battle. The easy and safe solution is to just cut it. Heskins not only keeps it, but ups its prominence in the story. You might think that nobody’s going to buy into a story where the villain is a mouse, but we’re in land where everything in made of confectionery. Remember, those little buggers eat everything. The first mention of the mouse queen is in the real-world opening scene, where Uncle Drosselmeyer tells the tall tale of the mouse queen’s threat to the sugar plum fairy. The setting is now an unsettled family forced to relocate by war (a nod to Ukraine families currently in Stoke), and Marie has an older sister who died, but other than that, the Act I story is reasonably faithful to the Act I of the ballet.
But first place was something that stood out as a clear winner in the opening minutes. 
Plenty of plays have talked about eating disorders, or eating disordered pushed on by ruthless marketing, so Kate Sumpter hit upon the idea of the equivalent mindset for exercise addiction. Playing a “Spin instructor” in a “spin studio”, the play does get bit confusing as to whether this is a conventional gym or one of these more modern remote online things. Actually, it’s neither of those, and the play gets a lot more surrealistic that what it first seems, but since this is coming to the Arcola next month I won’t give away any more spoilers and leave you to find out yourself if you’re near enough to London.
We begin with a celebration. Suzie is the first person ever from this town to have been accepted at Cambridge. It’s through this lens that we see how different the two worlds are. For Suzie, there’s a whole new life being opened up for her; for her older sister, the expectation is to just have kids, something she’s quite content with. Being the 1970s, it also passes without comment that the local WMC sex pest is policed by warning the young women not to end up alone with him (instead of, you know, telling him not to be a sex pest). What doesn’t pass without comment, however, is just how much of the menial work falls to the women – but without being full members they don’t get a say in how the club runs.
Seriously, Three’s Company Adventure Department is a project than began in 2020 when there wasn’t much else to do. Tom Crawshaw and Yaz Al-Shaater were joined by semi-retired founder-member Michael Grady-Hall for a set of comedy audio plays, where their serious podcast about making fringe theatre keeps getting interrupted by an adventure. Every episode is a different genre and basically parodies every story in that genre. This rare edition is an episode before a live audience, and is a parody of every slasher flick, featuring guest star Rob Rouse. Expect called of “Let’s play a game” to be answered with enthusiastic suggestions for Twister and/or Trivial Pursuit and confusion over Saw and See-Saw. Plus of course an urgent clarification that the trope of mental patients escaping hospitals is misleading, and whilst some people are a danger to others is it is irresponsible to make a generalisation that all neurodivergent people are mass murders. But, hey, it’s not irresponsible if it’s true. [Ominous theme, close in on my sinister eyes.]
It’s a very interactive show – no-one gets shown up, but there’s a clipboard passed round with lines that may or may not have been in the original Spielberg film. Interspersed with this, however, are accounts of being a comedian also bringing up a baby son, soon to be a toddler son. As with most comedy giving real-life events, some caution should be paid and anecdotes may have been embellished. However, a strong contender for wholesome moment of the year is Bibby’s dinosaur-obsessed child playing the part of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. (Also, if your first teenage crush was Ellie Satler but you’re now married, Dave Bibby might have the solution for you.)
he other people in his life over this time. In particular: what was happening with his wife and kids over this time? We didn’t hear much about that. There’s always two stories with any kind of mental breakdown: one is the effect on you directly, the other is the effect on the people who care for you. But that could have been a good point of reference with the outside world. How much did they try to help? Or did they realise there was nothing they could do? Was there rent or mortgage for this home, and if so who was paying it?
Debbie Cannon is a historian herself and knows her stuff inside out, but she’s not the only historian with an academic background to turn her hand to theatre. The recurring problem I’ve found is many of these historians know their stuff inside out, but don’t really understand how to do a dramatisation. As a result, there’s a lot of solo biopics around which are essentially a biography told in person and little more. Fortunately, we can count on Debbie Cannon’s past work of Green Knight. Nothing about the tale of Sir Gawain was changed, but she still used the information to create a Lady Bertilak very different from the original. This isn’t quite the same challenge – there’s a lot more facts known about Alice Thornton and therefore less room for imagination, and we don’t have a climax to a story like an Arthurian legend has. But she still pulls it off and creates a character that’s far more than another first-person biography.
Carleen and Crystal are aspiring influencers on “Wepipe”, presumably a fucticious equivalent of Youtube. It’s a mixture of being cool mates, doing sketches, and political discourse. If you’ve not kept up with social media discourse in real life (and honestly, if you’re not doing it, this isn’t a good time to start), you might have trouble keeping up with the details here – but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s all about saying whatever it is that gets out the most engagement, whether it’s saying something popular, or calling out another influencer for saying the wrong thing. But not too popular an influencer: it’s all a numbers game. You don’t want to set your followers on a rival influencer only for your rival’s to dogpile you. Carleen and Crystal aren’t the villains of the story, though; they are merely going along with what the algorithms want them to do.
Chris Neville-Smith's blog on theatre 