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. Continue reading
