Back to business: Pod and Shine

Skip to: Pod, Shine

Okay, here we go. Now that an extremely busy fringe season is out of the way, it’s time to catch up on all the other plays I’ve seen since we got going. I am planning to do most of these in the order I saw them, which I’m afraid will mean several plays are going to get reviews several months later. However, I am bumping this first article up the list due to a sort-of review request. It came to my attention that I was supposed to be invited to one of these plays, but the invitation never reached me. The details are far too boring to go into, but I thought I’d get this one out when things are still fresh.

So … Unlike the Festival Fringes, which have been running to a sort-of-normal since June, most theatres outside of London have opted for a September relaunch. And with that, a lot of eyes have been on the relaunch plays. Live Theatre and Alphabetti have both run plays for three weeks. At the moment, there is a lot of enthusiasm to praise everything simply for getting on stage. But, folks, I don’t hand out high praise as a participation prize. You still have to earn it. So, how did these do?

Pod

Pod isn’t actually Alphabetti’s reopening play – they have been bolder than most of their north-east counterparts and have been phasing in performances since April – but such was the fanfare around this one it may as well be their relaunch play. Coracle Theatre has been one of Alphabetti’s closest collaborators; indeed, they opened Alphabetti in its current venue the first time round. So whilst this play is a catch-up from a heavily postponed 2020 programme, it was good choice for a relaunch.

Between the fringes: Be More Martyn and Down to Zero

Yes, reviews are like buses here: you wait for ages for one to come and then you get five at once. These are two fringe-size plays I saw between Brighton and Edinburgh. Both plays very different from what I expected, and not necessarily on purpose. But by accident or by design, two pleasing outcomes.

Skip to: Be More Martyn, Down to Zero

Be More Martyn

Any attempt to liken this to any other play is doomed to fail. The thing that prompted Hope Theatre to create this is the thing nobody wanted: Martyn Hett was one of the victims of the Manchester Bombings two years ago. This is verbatim theatre, and there’s no shortage of verbatim pieces uses to talk about tragedies: Motherland and The 56 immediately spring to mind. But, classics though these two are, Be More Martyn could not be more different in tone. This is the kind of tribute – because that’s essentialy what the play is – that would be described as a celebration of a life rather than the mourning of a death. You could even say “It’s what he would have wanted”, and far from being a patronising cliche, this is what make the play one of the best things I’ve seen.

The story is told from “The Frigg”, which a bar that Martyn set up in his own flat in Stockport (reason for name unknown). So we are told, parties at The Frigg were wild, as were the many madcap trips to Manchester. But according to the accounts of these eight friends, there was more to Martyn than a party animal – he had a reputation for picking up with waifs and strays with few friends of their own and bringing them into his group.