Theatre Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

First staged in 1962, Edward Albee’s play of marital drama set on an American college campus is widely hailed as a classic. Adapted into a film in 1966 starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, it has been regularly revived over the decades, notably in the West End in 2017 with Imelda Staunton and Conleth Hill in the leading roles. And for a reason: this funny, visceral, intense and ultimately devastating play, unlike many of its contemporaries, has stood the test of time.

Now director David Mercatali—previously at the Tobacco Factory with productions of Blue Heart and Radiant Vermin—brings this landmark work to the intimate setting of the Factory Theatre. Over a daunting but utterly absorbing running time of three-and-a-half hours, we witness all the raw humour and gladiatorial savagery of Martha and George’s confrontational marriage unravelling in compelling close-up.

It’s an alcohol-soused spiral into the void as, returning wearily home from a faculty party in the early hours, the couple settle down for a nightcap. At first, they seem like any other long-married pair, bickering, teasing and goading—knowing each other’s flash points only too well, inhibitions extinguished through hours of hard drinking. But when Martha announces that she has invited two of the party guests back because her Daddy—who is president of the inauspiciously named New Carthage College—said she should, darker undertones emerge. The naïve younger couple Nick and Honey become drawn into their game-playing: first as voyeurs but later as active participants, out of their depth in an arena with seasoned competitors.

Albee’s words are so finely honed, his psychological observation so acute that he leaves actors nowhere to hide, demanding nuanced and meticulous performances. And this quartet really delivers: Mark Meadows is astounding as George, stooped and downtrodden as he paces the stage, bruised and battered by his lack of advancement as an associate professor in the History department and his wife’s subsequent taunting and infidelities. But clever, lively and vindictive, his pugilistic essence endures; stung by Martha’s interest in the younger man, he squares up to biologist Nick, needling him about a geneticist’s narrow vision of the future, withholding truths and weaving fictions, making weapons of confessions and turning his own self-loathing outward.

Pooky Quesnel’s Martha matches him in spirit with her frustrations and hinted-at personal sorrows. Cast in a 1960s role of stifling domestication, her influence deriving from her position as a powerful man’s daughter, she is ill-reconciled with being a less successful man’s wife. She’s fighting back every inch of the way, boiling with scorn for George but seductively suggestive to Nick, until he also disappoints her. Capable of arguing with her husband about everything, including whether the moon is up or down, in the final gut-wrenching act, Quesnel reveals a Martha finally stripped of all artifice. With mascara tears staining her face, her vulnerability and quiet desolation at her loss of illusions is shattering.

Joseph Tweedale and Francesca Henry as Nick and Honey underpin the central performances with strong support: as their optimistic veneer is peeled away, they are revealed as another couple with hidden demons. Initially arrogant and sure-footed, Tweedale’s Nick begins to find himself on less-than-certain ground, while Henry’s coltish, guileless Honey (the most underwritten of the four characters) veers from innocent delight in her hosts’ no-holds-barred behaviour to the dawning realisation that she is one of the victims of their vitriol.

This play was conceived in the era of the Cold War, at a time of explosive social and political upheaval, its black humour and domestic strife seemingly a microcosm of greater power struggles that are no less relevant today. On designer Anisha Field’s deceptively cosy and detailed living room set, for all its lamps, door chimes, books and much visited drinks table, it feels as though World War Three is breaking out—and, as with all momentous events, it’s impossible to look away.

Reviewed on 25 February 2020 | Images: Mark Dawson Photography

Theatre Review: Living Spit's Swan Lake at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

No sooner had the dust settled on their condensed version of Homer’s Odyssey than Living Spit duo Howard Coggins and Stu Mcloughlin return to the Tobacco Factory with their own unique take on Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. Having collaborated for the Greek epic in a threesome with songstress Kate Dimbleby, they now see fit to introduce not one but two professional dancers to this family-friendly retelling. Who knows, for their next production, they may decide to cram in a whole chorus.

Living Spit’s Swan Lake comes with a particular ornithological bias, framed by the Wetland Avian Council (WAC for short—they do love an acronym) convening on Swan Lake for their regular meeting. The members of WAC are the various birds living on the lake, represented by Coggins and Mcloughlin in breeches and flippers, and the audience divided into different species—ticking the Arts Council application diversity and audience participation boxes, as Coggins crows with satisfaction.

High on the agenda is the mystery surrounding the name of Swan Lake, given that no swans actually live there. Cue dancers Josh Hutchby and Francisca Mendo to re-enact selected pas de deux from the story, as the star-crossed lovers Prince Siegfried and Odette. Their stunning movement on the intimate stage is exquisitely choreographed by Holly Noble with particularly impressive pointe work from Mendo. It’s all the more elegant when seen so close up, and for its juxtaposition with Coggins and Mcloughlin’s panto-style buffoonery in the other roles—from the villainous magician Von Rothbart to Siegfried’s domineering Mum and his laddish best mate who presents him with a crossbow for his birthday.

Narrating in rhyme, the pair prove themselves once again to be masters of invention, clever wordplay and general silliness, and their improvised chorus work is a guffaw-inducing highlight in the closing moments of both acts. Their delight in questioning the convoluted logic of the ballet’s storyline, accepted without a raised eyebrow in classical productions, is a droll and accessible primer for newcomers young and old getting to grips with the work and its alternative sad or happy endings—as long as nobody takes the concept of anti-drowning pills too seriously.

However, on occasion, what lies beneath the frivolity does feel perilously two-dimensional; the princesses introduced as potential brides at the ball, for example, are only differentiated by a series of wigs and all too readily dispatched. The bird species divisions established in the audience at the top of the show could be carried further. And the inclusion of an interval in a production with a running time of a little over an hour feels intrusive and unnecessary.

That said, Living Spit has a strong community-based ethos and is always warmly—in this instance rapturously—received by Bristol audiences. This production is jointly presented with North Somerset performing arts charity Theatre Orchard, with whom they also manage the Theatre Shop in their hometown of Clevedon. It’s easy to imagine their Swan Lake being even more of a micro-ballet cackle of contrasting classical-meets-farcical styling, when it transfers billing to the Tobacco Factory’s smaller Spielman Theatre for the final (already sold out) days of this run.

Reviewed on 31 January 2020 | Images: Camilla Adams

Theatre Review: Living Spit's Odyssey at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Bristol comedy duo Living Spit returns to the Tobacco Factory with a unique rendition of Homer’s Odyssey. This home audience knows what to expect by now from Howard Coggins and Stu McLoughlin at their best, based on shows such as Adolf & Winston or Elizabeth I—Virgin on the Ridiculous: knockabout hilarity and bawdy jokes, supremely inventive storytelling and silly songs, audience interaction and plenty of dressing up with bad wigs.

Living Spit’s Odyssey is different, though, as the endearing duo are joined on stage by jazz and blues singer Kate Dimbleby and professional musician Sam Mills. Dimbleby takes centre stage as Penelope, waiting in Ithaca for 20 years while her husband Odysseus is away fighting in the Trojan wars and serially delayed on his epic journey home.

Penelope’s house is reinvented as a nightclub, because, rather than sitting and weaving for two decades, this 21st century version of an empowered Penelope has been entertaining her many suitors with song—her smoky tones layered to a crescendo on a vocal looper. It’s a strong opening number that she insists on finishing, despite the untimely interruption of a triumphantly returning Odysseus—played by Coggins and accompanied by McLoughlin’s Anonymous Minion 1—proclaiming, swearing and desperate to regale her with his exploits and explain his multiple detours.

Before a sceptical Penelope, Odysseus and his Minion then re-enact their travails—stopping off at the land of the Lotus Eaters because the ship’s crew wanted a proper poo in privacy, then trapped in a cave by the cyclops Polyphemus as they seek to exchange their plentiful supply of wine for a much-needed truckle of cheese. Supporting this narrative, Mills proves to be a versatile actor as well as musician, stepping in to play a dish-plying waiter in a Chinese restaurant and Polyphemus’s swivel-eyed lone surviving sheep.

There’s plenty of laugh-out-loud creativity in the simple rotation of dishes in the restaurant, the use of torches in the dark cave to create multiple characters and the panto-like retelling of the crew’s disastrous appropriation of Aeolus’s bag of winds. The songs are warm and witty and the foursome makes effective use of ingenious costumes and props and Katie Sykes’s simple circular set. But there are also moments between episodes where the comic momentum seems to flag.

The second act is much slicker, as Odysseus resists being turned into a pig by Circe thanks to a hilariously simple delivery from Hermes. His vivid sacrifice of a soft-toy goat and sheep draws gasps from the audience; he encounters a very lively Land of the Dead and evades the sirens’ call, only to be trapped by the nymph Calypso—an amorous McLoughlin dressed up in best shower-curtain style. There is even pathos as Penelope expresses doubts about her husband’s enduring love, accompanying herself on the ukulele, and Odysseus sings a torch song, joined by his wife in an unexpectedly moving duet.

While Living Spit’s brand of raucous playfulness has always been underpinned by structure and skill, this collaboration brings a new and hitherto unseen sophistication to their performance. Dimbleby is not only a singer and musician but also an accomplished raconteur; their contrasting styles meld successfully to bring greater depth to the show’s musicality and emotional breadth to its larky storytelling.

Reviewed on 12 November 2019 | Images: Camilla Adams

Theatre Review: Much Ado About Nothing at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory celebrates its 20th anniversary season in some style with a second production of Much Ado About Nothing. In her modern dress interpretation, director Elizabeth Freestone mines all the play’s sharp-tongued humour and disquieting duplicity to create a contemporary romantic comedy with a dark heart.

She has assembled a strong cast, including returning regulars and alumni from Bristol Old Vic’s theatre school, to deliver the tale of soldiers coming back from war to Leonato’s court in Messina. Zachary Powell is on commanding form as their leader Don Pedro, hatching plots to bring about the liaisons between Claudio and Hero and Beatrice and Benedick that underpin the play’s dynamic.

There are shades of a general seeking to keep his men on track in the aftermath of conflict, with light-hearted subterfuge helping them readjust to civilian life. By contrast, Georgia Frost’s Don Jon demonstrates the bleaker side of war’s profound psychological disturbances, as a soldier intent on darker deceits—slandering Hero’s virtuous reputation and causing Claudio to shame her—to avenge past perceived wrongs.

Dorothea Myer-Bennett delivers a beautifully judged Beatrice; intelligent in her fiery wit while verbally jousting with Benedick, she is alternately comic in falling for her friends’ playful deception of her sparring partner’s supposed declarations of love, then raging at her powerlessness as a woman in a man’s world. Whenever she’s on stage, it’s hard to look elsewhere, but Geoffrey Lumb’s convincing Benedick matches her in spirit. Though often outdone by Beatrice’s wit, Lumb finds depth beyond Benedick’s initial combination of charismatic swagger and gullibility, to declare his love with truthful sincerity and rally to her entreaties to right the wrong of Hero’s fate.

At times, the production feels as though it is veering too far into comic cliché with the masked ball, where many of the initial plans are laid, becoming a distracting superhero costume party. After the interval, the local Watch uncovering Don Jon’s connivance in full-on health and safety mode, complete with hard hats and high-viz jackets, feels rather over-worked. But Jean Chan’s minimal set and costumes are bright and summery, and there’s a joyous energy throughout, both in the dancing and in the musical interludes provided primarily by Bethan Mary-James as Hero’s maid Margaret—who gets away surprisingly lightly with her central role in her mistress's undoing.

After so many comic interludes and festive wedding preparations, the outcome of Claudio and Hero’s nuptials is brutally shocking; Imran Momen’s previously restrained Claudio is vicious in his rejection of Hannah Bristow’s sweetly trusting Hero. Equally outrageous to modern sensibilities is Leonato’s response in dismissing his daughter’s pleas of innocence and wishing she were dead. In a moving portrayal, Christopher Bianchi brings believability to Leonato’s short-lived paternal outburst, tumbling into sorrow and remorse as he accepts that she has been wronged.

As with many a Shakespeare play, it seems a long way back from here to a happy ending, with further deception, identity switching and a whole dose of forgiveness required to reunite the lovers. But Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s reputation for clear and compelling storytelling lives on; particularly in the latter stages, this dynamic yet thoughtful and nuanced interpretation treads the fine line between comedy and tragedy with consummate ease.

Reviewed on October 25 2019: Images: Mark Douet

Theatre Review: Me & Robin Hood at the Spielman Theatre,Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Me & Robin Hood is the second of Hoipolloi’s Loose Change trilogy examining inequality and the relative values we ascribe to life and art, while raising money for the charity Street Child United. It follows on from The Duke: Shôn Dale-Jones’s one-man tale of a porcelain family heirloom, that saw him seated at a desk, cueing up his own music and sound effects from a laptop.

For Me & Robin Hood—after his customary handshake greeting at the door—Dale-Jones appears on a stage that is empty aside from his water bottle. Yet, in this stripped-back setting, his storytelling has even more room to flourish. He needs the space to create his narrative—to imagine the front room of his childhood home in Anglesey, a football match he played for his local Llangefni under-11s team or a confrontation with a bank manager after an impromptu one-man demonstration with a placard.

Beneath his genial demeanour and charismatic wit, his personal worries about his mortgage and stress-induced skin condition, Dale-Jones is angry—about the inequality that exists in a world that accepts millions of children living on the streets and the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor stretching back to the Thatcher years. It’s time to invoke the spirit of his fictional friend Robin Hood—whom he first met in 1975, watching the six-part TV series as a seven-year-old, at home with his family and best mate.

In his eyes, Robin was a true radical, gainsaying the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham and robbing the rich to give to the poor. If he were here today, he wouldn’t be propping up the system by helping in his local charity shop, he’d be exploding the shared myths of society, plundering banks to redistribute cash and rewriting the story of money.

Weaving fact and fantasy together so seamlessly that the audience is left guessing where one finishes and the other begins, Dale-Jones questions our commonly held perceptions of what is acceptable in society. He admits he too is complicit, a product of the boarding-school education his Thatcher-supporting greengrocer father strove to provide for him, that chafes against the social conscience of his grandmother. But his show is raising money for street children and the challenge is there for us all to do what we can.

Looping back and forth through multiple threads, Dale-Jones is such a gifted storyteller and his tale so skilfully crafted that not a moment of this 70-minute monologue sags or drags. Reaching from the 12th century to the present via his childhood exploits, Me & Robin Hood encompasses friends and family, bank managers and robberies, a run-in with the police and an idiosyncratically off-kilter course of therapy. On an empty stage, Dale-Jones pushes at the boundaries; playful, challenging and seething with ideas.

Reviewed on 2 October 2019| Images: Murdo Macleod

Theatre Review: The Caucasian Chalk Circle at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Never let it be said that Bristol Old Vic Theatre School lacks ambition. Having recently concluded a marathon production of The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby with its graduate class, now those completing the MFA for international Professional Acting students take on Bertolt Brecht at the Tobacco Factory.

Written in 1944, The Caucasian Chalk Circle remains one of Brecht’s most accessible and popular works. Here, in Frank McGuinness’s modern translation, rather than beginning with two peasant communities in a land ownership dispute, the setting moves to an urban environment and the conflict between a local community and a property developer hell-bent on thinly-veiled gentrification. It’s an apt scenario in an area of Bristol where so much redevelopment has and is still taking place, lending added authenticity to the cast member activists greeting the audience at the door with flyers.

There’s much to enjoy as a group of travelling performers then invade the Expert’s presentation to hijack events and present a morality play over the rightful parentage of a baby, echoing Solomon’s biblical judgement. The youthful cast has an energetic life-force behind it and, under the direction of The Wardrobe Ensemble’s Jesse Jones, injects well-choreographed pace and verve into the story. The musical narration is engaging and there’s a tangible sense of mischief in many of the performances, with over-the-top archetypes of the landed elite receiving their comeuppance in the chaos of civil war, while the peasant underclass exploits their desperation, extracting a living any way they can.

At times, though, the buffoonery becomes too frenetic at the expense of narrative clarity, as eclectically adopted accents wander and some of the lines become difficult to hear when yelled with full force. But it does provide a meaningful contrast to the poignant central story of Grusha, a young servant girl who risks everything to save an abandoned baby from the war’s ravages.

Though Brecht’s emphasis is on alienation and social commentary, wanting audiences to engage in critical thinking rather than pure emotion, Grusha’s moral dilemmas are this play’s essential core and Marine Laurencelle brings endearing integrity to the role. Her tentative moments of love with her soldier fiancé Simon, played with touching warmth and understanding by James Costello Ladanyi, are the most affecting of the production, as Grusha remains true to her conscience and growing love for baby Michael, despite the great personal sacrifice entailed.

There’s effective use of projected backdrops and simple wooden crates on wheels to provide instant changes of levels, as Grusha escapes across rivers and over the mountains to the relative safety of her brother’s house. Other aspects of the staging using inflatable chairs and space-hoppers feel bizarre, though arguably adding to the aura of Brechtian absurdity. One of the most bleakly funny scenes plays out when Grusha marries Adam Troyer’s dying farmer in a bid to afford Michael protection, only to find her groom springs miraculously back to life once the war is over and he is no longer in danger of being called up.

Alice Birbara endows the wily judge Azdak with wild coke-snorting licentiousness, combined with an underlying hunger for justice that sees the chalk circle being invoked as she decides on Michael’s future parentage. Freja Zeuthen provides a comically outrageous portrayal of the spoilt, pouting Governor’s wife Natella, only interested in reclaiming her son when she realises the inheritance he will bring. This year’s students should be commended for their achievements; their production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is memorable for some fine performances, pleasing musicality, committed ensemble work and the intensity of its retelling.

Reviewed on 26 June 2019 | Images: Mark Dawson Photography

Theatre Review: The Stranger on the Bridge at Tobacco Factory Theatres

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

The difference between life and death can be infinitesimally small; captured in the moment it takes for a stranger to stop beside a man on a bridge - a young man balanced on the edge of the railings ready to jump.

Such moments of humanity indicate that a world of support and compassion does exist - that an outstretched hand can help that man survive. In Mental Health Awareness Week, The Stranger on the Bridge explores the real-life reasons that brought Jonny Benjamin to contemplate suicide and his quest to find the man who saved his life on Waterloo Bridge that morning in 2008.

Jonny’s subsequent #FindMike social media campaign was covered in a Channel 4 documentary in 2015. Now in this new play from Katie Hims, developed by Postcard Productions, the timeline alternates between Jonny's search for the man he has arbitrarily called Mike and his life leading up to that fateful day.

It’s Jonny’s story and he’s played with endearing warmth, vulnerability and openness by Jack Brownridge-Kelly - astonishingly in his first professional role - who switches between narration, engaging the audience and acting out key scenes. In a clever piece of theatricality that brings the terrors of mental illness to life, he’s joined on stage by his nemesis, Panda, the voice that has existed in Jonny’s head since he was ten.

Panda tells Jonny what to do and threatens all sorts of catastrophes for family and friends if he doesn’t obey. A swearing, hectoring and sometimes disturbing presence, he’s energetically and humorously realised by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduate Marco Young, building on his last promising performance at the Tobacco Factory in Welcome to Thebes.

As his social media campaign goes viral, Jonny is troubled when one interviewer suggests that Mike doesn’t really exist but is a figment of his imagination. Yet soon, many Mikes step forward and Jonny’s problem is in identifying the right one.

Other characters in Jonny’s life are empathetically portrayed by a trio of actors: Joanna Van Kampen, Robert Macpherson and Jessica May Buxton, who introduce a welcome lightness to the play’s emotional range; stepping in and out of the action as they switch roles, bickering about who should be the next doctor or worrying whether their portrayal is sufficiently true-to-life.

Some of the most affecting moments are when Jonny meets those whose relatives didn’t have a Mike to save them; he faces their anger at a loved one’s selfish act and guilt for not being there to help. But he is encouraged by e-mails thanking him for revealing his struggle with depression, creating a discussion that has made the senders realise they’re not alone.

Lizzie Minnion’s direction of such sensitive subject matter is immediate and beautifully thoughtful. Yet the play's pacing occasionally feels unbalanced; through a desire to include all the details, the initial scene-setting of Jonny’s childhood tends towards the leisurely, delaying our arrival at the heart of the story. By contrast, his time at university, seminal friendships and exploration of his sexuality could have been further developed.

It’s striking how seldom Jonny is helped by professionals - one doctor breezily advising him to eat more fruit and vegetables - in comparison to a stranger’s random act of kindness. Yet help is out there; many organisations are ready to listen, and the possibilities of theatre’s healing role are revealed by the play’s moving conclusion, featuring performers from Bristol-based mental health theatre group Stepping Out.

The Stranger on the Bridge is a courageous and inspiring tale of triumph over despair, poignant in the simplicity of Jonny’s eventual meeting with his saviour, ultimately uplifting in its message that devastating mental illness can be survived and, if not necessarily conquered, then subsequently lived alongside.

Reviewed on 15 May 2019| Images: Jack Offord

Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide 

Launching the Tobacco Factory Theatres’ 2019 repertory season, A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings the shock of the new to this most familiar of Shakespeare’s works. The Factory Company’s vigorously driven production translates the traditional Athenian setting into a dystopian near-future Britain, re-examining the dynamics of the play’s central relationships and bestowing a stripped-back clarity on its interwoven stories.

Director Mike Tweddle, returning after last year’s successful inaugural productions of A View from the Bridge and Beautiful Thing, has cleverly updated the relationships between the four lovers with some judicious gender switching. As Lysander becomes Evlyne Oyedokun’s impassioned Lysanda, in love with Hermia, it becomes clearer to a modern audience why Egeus might forbid them from marrying. And Joseph Tweedale’s sparky Helenus, determined to reclaim the affection of Demetrius, introduces a fluid contemporary edge to the confusion of the foursome’s fast-shifting allegiances in the night-time forest.

Nor is Tweddle afraid to push the work’s boundaries in terms of its political setting. Anna Reid’s design and some haunting original music recreate a dark and often frightening place where, in disobeying her father’s wishes, Hermia genuinely fears for her life. The tension between Charleen Qwaye’s brooding Hippolyta and Luca Thompson’s dictatorial Theseus introduces an intriguing power play and the pair’s additional take on Titania and Oberon is equally ferocious, creating a sexual chemistry that is lacking in some of the other couplings.

The flip-side of this bleak realpolitik energy, however, is that some of the play’s evocative, dreamlike quality seeps away. Rather than magical, the forest becomes an earthy and sinister setting, where Kim Heron’s sprightly Puck deploys her mischief-making with a menacing edge. Titania’s fairy attendants are more akin to a subversive tribe, comedically surly rather than enchanting in their endeavours. At times, this can lead to a feeling of imbalance between the narrative’s separate strands, that there is not enough lightness in the dark.

That said, the comedy is exceptionally well crafted. The fairies’ effortful transportation of Titania around the forest in a roll-top bath on a pallet lifter and Oberon’s distinctive spell-casting style are nice touches. The Rude Mechanicals are a convincingly raggle-taggle amdram bunch, their chaotic rehearsals trounced by the final laugh-out-loud performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, complete with inappropriate costumes and a farcical wall.

Heather Williams is an engagingly boisterous and playful buffoon as Bottom, both with and without her ass’s ears. Meanwhile, Dan Wheeler’s Flute, arriving at rehearsals by bike in a yellow high-viz jacket and helmet, painfully gabbling his lines before discovering an affinity for playing in drag, is particularly affecting.

The multi-rolling cast is solid throughout, though the heightened energy means that some verse-speaking rhythm is inevitably lost in the momentum. While not everything may quite come off, the vision is to be applauded; this is a bold and refreshing take on Shakespeare’s classic tale that questions and entertains in equal measure.

Reviewed on 5 March 2019, runs until 6 April 2019 | Images: Mark Dawson Photography

Theatre Review: The Gift of Presents - Spielman Theatre, Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

At some time during The Gift of Presents, you might reflect that, near the beginning of the show, you were offered the chance to leave. You’d already surprised Shesus at her birthday party and seen her perform some nifty Christmas-themed lip-synched routines with her two devout followers. Was this not an auspicious time to head for the exit, before things became even more disconcertingly interactive?

Though you may still wonder where it’s all heading, it’s testament to the talent of London-based trio Shesus and the Sisters that you’re glad you stayed. Part Christmas party with festive music, pass the parcel and a budget chocolate yule log, part commentary on the preoccupations and ills of today’s society both politically and personally, their energetically bonkers show has real inclusiveness and warmth.

This is the first time performing in Bristol for the company: Loose Baker, visually arresting in white robes with flowing locks as the multi-gendered drag-king Missiah Shesus, and twin sisters Lauren and Danielle Meehan as Mary Berry and Pauline Hollywood. With their red lips and brows on fleek, the two nuns may be wearing more make up than conventionally expected for their calling, but this is a party, after all.

The threesome works deceptively hard at entertaining, with fast-paced cabaret and quick-fire banter backed up by plenty of clowning. They indulge in some gleeful physical comedy, clambering about the intimate Spielman Theatre, distributing food and encouraging an assortment of mad-cap group activities.

There’s no shortage of tongue-in-cheek silliness, innuendo and off-the-cuff wit, as the audience sings along and rewrites a favourite Christmas song with more adult themes. It makes the mood-change even more startling when the performance swerves into spoken verse and the sort of fragile, heartfelt confessions that tend to come out when you’ve overindulged in the eggnog.

At times, their performance is vaguely based on a liturgical church service, though the opportunity to greet your neighbour has the potential to become something more extreme. At others, they veer towards paganism and the spirituality of rebalancing the universe and calling on the cosmos for group therapy and healing.

Perhaps it could do with a little trimming here and there, but, for all the daftness and improvised interaction, the show is underpinned by a solid structure and choreography that allows its performers to push the boundaries. Thought-provoking, entertaining and irreverent all in one, The Gift of Presents is the Mother Superior of Christmas parties and you won’t go to another quite like it.

Reviewed on 11 December 2018 | Images: Giloscope (Giles Smith)

Theatre Review: The Borrowers at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Mary Norton’s magical 1950s tale of the tiny people who might be living under our floorboards is reimagined in a Bristolian setting by award-winning writer Bea Roberts. A message of inclusiveness - about the need to cherish our environment and show kindness to strangers however different they may be - is threaded through this captivating family Christmas show that fizzes with exuberance, inventiveness and fun.

The story is framed in the reminiscences of kindly Eddie from Merseyside, revisiting the house where he stayed as a 10-year-old boy. Beneath the boards at 23 Myrtle Avenue lived the minuscule Clock family, teenager Arrietty and her parents Homily and Pod.

Initially apprehensive but excited at the thought of sharing the house with some new ‘human beans’, the family’s contained existence is soon thrown into turmoil by the arrival of Eddie’s cleaning-obsessed Aunty Val, determined to update the inconveniently Victorian property in custard yellow and scour its every surface free of accumulated dust.

Quirky and buoyant original music composed by David Ridley, who also takes on the role of young Eddie, lifts the early pace of Nik Partridge’s direction, occasionally slowed by the amount of narration required from Simon Armstrong as the older, wiser Eddie. Once the context is established, the ever-present musicians weave in and out of the story, adding to its sense of whimsical enchantment. In the intimate setting of the Factory Theatre, there’s great fun to be had with differing scales. The Borrowers grapple with an array of oversized props, from a cotton bud wielded as a weapon to the protective shelter of an empty sardine tin, its lid half peeled away.

As Arrietty becomes emboldened in venturing above the boards, Rosanna Vize’s versatile set comes into its own. Clambering along horizontally suspended ladders and sliding down ropes, Arrietty meets Eddie and the pair form an unlikely and frowned-upon friendship, their size difference simply but ingeniously contrasted and alternating in perspective.

Jessica Hayles’s brave and curious Arrietty finds her longing to explore the larger world is fulfilled at a cost, but her sense of wonder as she runs through blades of grass far taller than her head is irresistible. Craig Edwards makes the most of his role as the risk-averse protocol-obsessed Pod and there’s a lovely lightness to Peta Maurice’s adventurous and worldly Homily.

Lucy Tuck, veteran of Tobacco Factory Theatre Christmas productions, steals the show with her every appearance as obnoxious Liverpudlian Aunty Val. She’s a one-woman whirlwind of tacky redecoration, vacuuming and barking at Eddie (and the audience) for cluttering up the place; her musical number as she single-handedly takes on a bevy of oversized dust balls is a riot.

When Aunty Val closes in on the perceived threat within her walls and musician Ellie Showering performs an uproarious cameo as pest-controlling Sheila, can Eddie do enough to save the Clock family from their fate?

Danger may come from unexpected sources but so does the prospect of a new beginning. The timeless story of The Borrowers shows us how it’s possible to be little yet still overcome great adversity with courage. This beautifully judged show in both performance and tone will surely bring a sprinkling of magic to people of all shapes and sizes this Christmas.

Runs until 20 January 2019 | Images: Mark Dawson Photography

Theatre Review: Rocky Shock Horror at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

The Wardrobe Theatre’s alternatively adult Christmas comedies have become something of a Bristolian institution over recent years, splicing together two popular genres with unlikely but hilarious results. They’ve previously bestowed Muppits Die Hard and Goldilock, Stock and Three Smoking Bears on an unsuspecting world.

Now, with Oedipuss in Boots about to open in their home venue, director Tom Brennan has revived 2016’s hit Rocky Shock Horror with a new cast and a tour of the south of England, kicking off in the Tobacco Factory. This madcap musical charting the increasingly surreal exploits of Rocky Featherboa is about to reach a whole new audience.

The clue, as always, is in the title; the 1976 film starring Sylvester Stallone about a small-time boxer who takes on the fight of his life collides with Richard O’Brien’s cult sci-fi parody The Rocky Horror Show. Down on his luck and low on self-esteem, Rocky’s life is going nowhere. Even his coach Mickey berates him and his relationship with Adrian, the shy girl he loves, is faltering thanks to some Trump-style locker room advice about what girls like from best friend Paulie.

The touring four-strong cast may not have had a hand in the script’s original devising, but they capture its spirit from the first; deliberately clunky and repetitive dialogue is tackled with comic overacting, dodgy Philadelphian accents and multi-rolling, gender-swapping verve.

There’s plenty of potential for chaos, but the show is elevated by its constant flow of clever, exposition-filled songs, split-second timing and smart choreography. There’s a riotous attempt at Thanksgiving, grappling with an over-sized turkey and an ingenious yet oddly poignant ice-dancing date in an abandoned skating rink. And when world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed materialises in flamboyantly unlikely boxing gear to issue his challenge, the storyline takes off into delightfully bonkers and risqué territory. For it’s not only the fight of Rocky’s life, but he must also take on a quest to save the whole of humanity…

Caitlin Campbell does an admirable job in the central role of Rocky, a gutsy but none-too-bright straight man with a good heart and a bad wig. Daniel Norford swerves between macho posturing (albeit in high heels) as Mickey and increasingly assertive femininity as Adrian, a heroine for the #MeToo generation. This is a woman in touch with her sexuality, taking what she wants when she wants it, once her coy veneer has been stripped away.

Kim Heron is a blur of dextrous physicality in the roles of Paulie and Riff-Raff, presiding over much of the action on roller skates. Meanwhile, Alex Roberts as Creed steals every millimetre of limelight whenever he appears; strutting about the stage and flirting with the audience, he’s the outrageously over-the-top brazen drag-queen of boxing.

Maybe in the second half the storyline becomes too bizarre and unresolved, but it doesn’t really matter, because the belly laughs keep on rolling. Rocky Shock Horror is the perfect antidote to traditional Christmas fare; a hugely enjoyable and audacious flashback to the seventies, with enough contemporary edge to keep its audience hooked.

Reviewed on 13 November 2018 | Images: Paul Blakemore

Theatre Review: The Duke at The Spielman Theatre, Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Rather than taking on an alter ego, Hoipolloi’s Shôn Dale-Jones is keen to emphasise he’s being himself in The Duke. And indeed, his hour of one-man storytelling feels very personal: a funny, heart-warming and poignant blend of real and imaginary events.

It’s a deceptively complex and contemporary tale that belies the fluency of its recounting to gnaw away at the relative values we ascribe to life and art, not only in financial but emotional terms as well. It’s also perfectly suited to the intimate space of the Tobacco Factory’s newly opened Spielman Theatre.

Shôn’s central thread is of a family heirloom, a Royal Worcester porcelain statue of the Duke of Wellington that his Dad bought as an investment in 1974 and kept under his bed, wrapped in sponge, to gradually increase in worth. After her husband’s death, while Shôn is working on a breakthrough film script, his mum calls him in disarray from Anglesey, to tell him that she’s accidentally broken The Duke.

Pushing aside a fast-approaching deadline for revisions that will tear the soul out of his script but mean his work might get financed, Shôn embarks on a mission to track down a replacement statue. But current events keep intruding into his consciousness; taking in the charity shops of his home town of Cambridge, he and his mother meet a refugee family—a mother of two young children whose husband has been left behind.

Seated at a desk, choreographing his own music and sound effects from his laptop, Shôn weaves these disparate strands together into a fantastical road trip to Anglesey. His mother, his film script and the refugee crisis all vie for his attention. You may never quite know how far real events are overtaken by inventiveness, but there’s a playful sense of which way the scales are tipping.

Though Shôn’s been touring this show since August 2016, he wasn’t the same man he was a year ago or will be in a year’s time, he says. He has the knack of drawing the world closer; alongside family, the political becomes personal, too. Sadly, the refugee crisis remains as pertinent as ever, but rather than dwell in guilt, he’s been doing something about it. Since he began, The Duke has raised nearly £50,000 for child refugees.

The Duke is an antidote to our divided times, emphasising connection and kindness. Told with charismatic wit and warmth it delivers an enduring message with the lightest of touches, that even if you can’t solve everything for everybody, it’s still possible to give what you can.

Reviewed on 30 October 2018 | Image: Brian Roberts

Theatre Review: Beautiful Thing at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

It’s the 25th anniversary of Jonathan Harvey’s play, later a Channel 4 film, about a coming-of-age relationship between two adolescent schoolboys. In 1993, this celebration of love whatever its guise struck a chord with the LGBT community and challenged pervasive anti-gay sentiment. An AIDS epidemic was taking its toll and teaching about the acceptance of homosexuality in a family context was banned in schools.

Times have changed and so here has the message. Though the recently reported rise in hate crime is a reminder that today’s inclusive society may be little more than a veneer, Mike Tweddle’s nostalgic direction and the involvement of a community choir lends this revival a mood more homespun and heart-warming than revolutionary.

Beautiful Thing charts the growing affinity of shy, bullied Jamie and sporty Ste, both living on a south London council estate. Jamie’s mum Sandra works all hours in a pub to make ends meet, his father has long-since vanished. Ste lives with an alcoholic father and drug-dealing brother. When he is abused one night for burning the bubble and squeak, Sandra takes Ste in, warning that the only space for him to sleep is top-to-toe with Jamie.

From here burgeons a teenage romance like any other, nervous and hesitant. Yet it’s layered with further sensitivities; each boy struggling to accept his own sexuality and vulnerable to the prejudices of the outside world. Ted Reilly and Tristan Waterson as Jamie and Ste convincingly portray this awkwardness, their tentative relationship developing within the confines of schooldays and the council estate.

Harvey’s writing is still sharp and funny: as Jamie reads aloud to Ste from the pages of his mum’s Hello magazine, the pair discuss Sally from Coronation Street. In a later scene, progressing to the listings in a gay magazine, Jamie tells Ste with confidence that frottage is a kind of yoghurt.

Anisha Fields’s understated set cleverly creates a council estate with concrete barriers and coloured metal frames and there’s a London Road vibe in the choir representing the estate’s inhabitants, complete with hanging baskets and potted plants. The music that underlines the action is a mixed medley: Mama Cass from the counter-culture of the sixties, a throwback to more experimental times, and nineties reminiscences in the soundtrack and a choral rendition of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

There’s little opportunity for the boys to escape; when they opt for the supposed anonymity of a gay bar, word spreads quickly. As in A View from the Bridge, Tweddle’s debut for the Tobacco Factory, the principal characters find themselves bound by strictures of class and community.

Yet support is found in unexpected places; from mouthy, trouble-making Leah, played with spirit by Amy-Leigh Hickman, from Sandra’s pseudo-hippy boyfriend Tony (Finn Hanlon) and eventually from spiky, battle-hardened Sandra (a wonderfully feisty Phoebe Thomas) herself. There’s more than one sort of love on display and the bond between mother and son that endures despite their fighting is poignantly reaffirmed.

Although its ending feels over-sweet and under-powered, this is an endearing revival and sentimental backward glance that will resonate with anybody who grew up in the nineties. It may lack the cutting edge of Beautiful Thing’s original breakthrough but succeeds on the level of tenderly capturing the precious volatility of a first love that strives for acceptance against society’s prejudice.

Runs until 27 October 2018 | Images: Mark Dawson Photography

Theatre Review: Henry V at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide 

"Here was a royal fellowship of death". In the battle of Agincourt, the powerful die alongside the powerless, dukes are slain as well as luggage boys. Shakespeare’s Henry V provides an explosive reminder that there are no winners in war, only a bloodied and diminished survival. What emerges from the visceral exchange is a need to heal divisions, both between warring countries and within each battered land.

At the beginning of Elizabeth Freestone’s dynamic production, Henry is an awkward and uncertain king, clinging to the partying of his misspent youth. War with France seems not so much his decision as that of his closest advisers. But Ben Hall’s Henry has a thread of steel, almost menace, running through him that gives credence to his transformation. Despite his hangover and slept-in clothes, slumped shoulders and uneasy gait, here is a man capable of threatening the citizens of Harfleur with rape and pillage and standing by as his friend Bardolph is brutally executed for looting.

What seems less obvious is that Henry will also become an inspirational leader, able to rally his troops before the approaching firestorm. But Hall crosses this divide with dexterity, delivering a thrilling "Once more unto the breach, dear friends". Now he is a warrior king forged in the crucible of war, bitter experience informing the growing wisdom of more thoughtful moral judgements.

Having already run for a month at the Ustinov in Bath over the summer, this Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory production has had time to bed in, feeling at ease in its contemporary context. Lily Arnold’s simple set of metal cage platforms strewn with grit is both an austere reminder of war’s stringencies and a versatile backdrop, remoulding a podium for kings into the trenches of France and flag-draped coffins of the fallen. Only an over-reliance on two microphones to herald every proclamation of importance has the potential to prove a touch wearying.

Joanne Howarth as Chorus is a folder-carrying, spectacle-wearing bureaucrat who introduces each act with the resignation of one who has seen it all before. Her clarity of verse speaking is matched by that of the tightly-choreographed ensemble cast, who seamlessly switch allegiance in war from England to France and back again with nimble changes of jacket and insignia. Like the gun fodder of World War I, dying only yards apart, the foot soldiers on both sides have everything in common.

There’s a prescient alchemy in Freestone’s decision to remould Katharine as a shaven-headed soldier. Combining the roles of princess and dauphin, Heledd Gwynn portrays her as a punky feminist streetfighter who looks forward to the rigours of battle, but also plunges the depths of grief over her slain lover and meets Henry’s wooing in the final act on her own terms.

Here Henry and Katharine’s verbal jousting is full of ambiguity. This is no simple capitulation and the symbolism of their two shaven heads locked together in eventual embrace is striking. Sacrifices on both sides are needed for the first tentative buds of fragile conciliation to appear; Freestone’s Henry V has mined the personal and political divisions of the medieval world and found in them our own.

Runs until 6 October 2018 and then touring | Images: Craig Fuller

Theatre Review: Welcome to Thebes at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for the British Theatre Guide

A country ravaged by civil war emerging from the ashes of destruction to become a fledgling democracy. A paternalistic patron, who could make all the difference, arriving to visit the wastelands. It could be the setting of so many conflict zones in recent history but, in Moira Buffini’s 2010 play, this is Thebes, centre of an ancient Greek myth now transposed to the near future.

Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s graduating students show admirable ambition in tackling this thrilling if uneven epic but suffer in the opening scenes from the weight of exposition required to set up Buffini’s poetic complexity of tensions.

Eurydice (Emma Prendergast), widow of Creon, is democratically elected leader of Thebes, promising to rebuild the country with a distinctly feminist agenda. She may be supported by a sisterhood, but she still needs aid from Theseus (Alexander Mushore), arrogant first citizen of neighbouring superpower Athens, to do so.

A summit between the two heads of state and Eurydice’s inauguration are hindered by her vengeful refusal to bury the body of former dictator Polynices, the murderer of her son. The nation unsettled, opposition leader Tydeus (Marco Young), a violent malcontent from the former regime goaded by Polynices’s wife Pargeia (Lucia Young), sees his opportunity to seize control.

Towards the latter part of the first half, this production gets into its stride as Eurydice and Theseus become locked together in negotiations that threaten to demand too much. Their performances are well matched: Prendergast a compelling and idealistic Eurydice, firm in her belief that her new manifesto should not be compromised by Athens’s profit-motivated view of Thebes, while Mushore’s Theseus oozes entitlement as he seeks to take possession, on both a national and a personal level.

The country’s violent militia and the hawkish security contingent from Athens circle the unfolding narrative, unhinged Antigone (an incredibly expressive Bonnie Baddoo) vows to bury her brother and blind soothsayer Tiresias (a mournful George Readshaw) foretells of doom. Free-will and destiny collide, culminating in a disturbing standoff with explosive consequences that threaten the basis of this fragile democracy.

Counterpoint to the action are the touching testimonies of those who have lost family and friends through war and the personal tragedy of Antigone’s sister Ismene (movingly portrayed by Anna Munden) who keeps her suffering to herself until she can bear it no longer. But Buffini’s writing is playful, too: evoking the myth of Phaedra as Theseus repeatedly calls his wife on a mobile phone and then asks his son Hippolytus to search for her, while a bittersweet moment finds an almost blind Haemon (James Bradwell) proposing to the wrong person.

Director Lucy Pitman-Wallace uses Emily Leonard’s simple but effective stone plinth design and Daniel Scott’s strikingly demarcated costumes to build from some initially static moments; the desecration and brutality of war, the fragility of democracy and compromises and corruption of power are finally laid bare. What begins with the capacity to confuse ends with the momentum of a genuinely absorbing and satisfying piece, with performances full of potential from a talented and committed company.

Reviewed on 22 June 2018 | Image: Craig Fuller

Theatre Review: Three Sisters at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The British Theatre Guide

There’s little in this show’s title and its innocuous-sounding ‘After Chekhov’ disclaimer to suggest the anarchic, exhilarating and playfully intelligent subversion that lies within.

While RashDash is well-versed in tackling the social and political ideas behind traditional narratives, this is its first foray into interpreting a classic. It takes a drawing room in 1901, somewhere in the Russian countryside, where three painfully constrained sisters are living out their days, and asks why.

If male, the characters would be philosophising, but, with all men removed from the play, their feminine talk is viewed as lacking in merit. That is until the consciously disjointed narrative is blasted apart with music, from vibrant and incisive punk to mournful power ballads, before being cradled back together with the lingering shared physicality of movement and dance. It’s less an updating of a familiar story and more an explosive examination of how the dead white guys still get so much attention.

The framework of Chekhov’s writing and his big questions - of dreams, dissatisfaction, and isolation - remain in this mixture of forms, but these three sisters throw in a few of their own. Olga (Helen Goalen), Masha (Abbi Greenland) and Irena (Becky Wilkie) unfetter themselves in a frenzy of costume changes that suggest this play’s many reinventions. After baring all, they transform into present-day young women. What resonance does Chekhov hold for them? Why do the men still get all the best lines?

Aspects of the dissection of the staging and meaning of theatre recall the perceptiveness of Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play. Time passes with an endlessly looping Tick Tock on an LED screen, while Irena is still being enchanted by a spinning top. But now, questions of love and destiny are wrapped up in creating events on Facebook and swiping on Tinder.

Interspersed with the music and dance are witty explorations of the weight of the playwright’s canon. The sisters become Chekhov’s cheerleaders and two pinion the third to the floor under a pile of dusty tomes. Newspaper reviews of various Three Sisters revivals are read aloud, mutating into song, from male reviewers opining about who should and should not be permitted to interpret the work.

Not a weak link can be discerned in the three superlatively self-aware performances: raw, energy-charged, and full of heart. The company’s two talented musicians - Chloe Rianna on drums and Yoon-Ji Kim on violin and synth - are well-integrated into the action and given their moments to shine. Rosie Elnile’s set design - a fallen chandelier, a bathtub and a disconnected view - simply and inventively accommodates the piece’s themes.

RashDash’s Three Sisters is feminism unstoppered, riotously entertaining and empowering but also personal and reflective. When the early 20th century costumes are rebuttoned, there’s a sense that the genie is being shoved back into the bottle, but with every expectation that it won’t be staying there for long.

Reviewed on 12 June 2018 | Image: Richard Davenport/The Other Richard

Theatre Review: Beauty and the Beast at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

Bristol’s Tobacco Factory has garnered a deserved reputation for the quality of its family Christmas shows and this year’s playfully quirky Beauty and the Beast is no exception. Think Disney unplugged; New International Encounter (NIE) and Cambridge Junction, under the direction of Alex Byrne, revisit the original French fairy-tale and strip it back to its story-telling essentials, conjuring up a delightfully eerie musical adventure full of mischief and heartfelt rustic charm.

The fable’s central message – that beauty is only skin-deep and it’s what’s under the surface that counts – may be well-worn but it’s delivered with real energy and freshness by NIE’s five-strong cast of actor-musicians. Maurice (Ben Tolley), a bankrupt Gallic shipowner, relocates his family to an impoverished hovel – known as Le Gite Terrible – in the middle of a forest. Terrible twins Latrice and Anastasia, played with ghastly verve by Samantha Sutherland and Stefanie Mueller (in this performance replacing Elliot Davis) hate their new environment and long to return to Paris, but Sara Lessore’s down-to-earth Isabella is drawn to the gite’s humble charms and soon has plans for a well-stocked vegetable garden.

Little do they realise that in a nearby chateau lurks a hideous beast – transformed from a vain and shallow playboy by a witch’s curse – until Maurice seeks shelter there in a storm and only escapes with his life when Isabella resolves to take his place as the chateau’s prisoner. Martin Bonger’s Beast combines the haunted, restless physicality of his enduring ordeal with a light-hearted turn as his new captive’s potential suitor; his song asking to be Isabella’s hairy fella is a comic masterpiece. Lessore, meanwhile, portraying a strong character in her own right, is also his perfect foil. Her Isabella radiates goodness and purity of heart without (despite her sisters’ condemnation of her creepiness) ever crossing the threshold into an annoying goody-two-shoes. The moments when she laughs at the Beast’s terrible Christmas cracker-style one-liners and later realises she loves him are full of poignancy and dawning revelation.

NIE and Cambridge Junction’s Beauty and the Beast is an enchanting antidote to everyday life. The original, folksy score is captivating and mood-changing, underpinning the narrative with a seamless blend of jaunty rhymes, searing strings, woodwind, percussion, and accordion. Stefanie Mueller’s inventive set design transforms from humble cottage to gothic chateau to table-top romance with the manipulation of a few wooden boards around a stage dotted with statues and foliage. Audience interaction (at this matinee with a house full of excited primary school children) is pitched at just the right level, while the simple addition of a wheel-barrow, a couple of chandeliers and some fallen leaves is all that’s needed to complete the picture.

Reviewed on 14 December 2017 | Image: Mark Dawson

Theatre Review: Living with the Lights On at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

Mark Lockyer portrayed a convincingly complex Iago in the Tobacco Factory’s Othello earlier this year, unleashing the dark and destructive forces of a master manipulator on those most deserving of his loyalty. Now he returns to the Factory Theatre in his one-man show Living with the Lights On, recounting his own personal encounter with the Devil in a performance of unflinching, soul-baring honesty.

In this Actors Touring Company production, Lockyer welcomes his audience into the theatre with disarming ease – offering the tea and Hobnobs of a typical village hall gathering. There isn’t any barrier or theatrical artifice – the lights, quite literally, are always on. He sets the scene with humour and pathos, but mental illness isn’t cosy or inclusive. His story soon turns to the very public breakdown he experienced as Mercutio in a performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Romeo and Juliet.

Under Ramin Gray’s nimble direction, Lockyer’s delivery switches from manic intensity when meeting the Devil – who is bizarrely dressed as a Californian beach boy – on a country walk near Stratford, running amok on the RSC stage and being unfaithful to his long-term girlfriend, to moments of quieter reflection on the consequences of his actions. He deftly characterizes those he loves or meets along the way – his mother, the doctors and the RSC landlord who frowns at the pizza boxes and saucers of ‘Holy water’ he has strewn around his bedroom.

As the tale of his disintegration continues, the moments of lucidity become fewer. His actions spiral into self-destruction and a reckless relationship with a can of petrol. Lockyer maps out the all-consuming suffering of his existence with such clarity that at times it’s difficult to keep watching. Most remarkable, but sadly not surprising, is how lightly his plight is brushed aside by the authorities; not only missing the clues but actively looking away, as he is sent home alone from hospital after a stomach pumping because there are no beds available.

It’s a cathartic, compelling 80-minute bombardment of pain, leavened by Lockyer’s flashes of bleak and self-deprecating humour. After descending into the depths of hell, the help he was crying out for is eventually at hand and he begins to find a path back to his former life. If it seems miraculous that Lockyer is now back on stage, this clearly took years of small steps to recovery that are summarised a little too quickly. Perhaps this is because these steps are still being taken and this show is a part of that. As a one-man embodiment of the fall from the precipice of sanity, it’s a courageous and insightful reminder of how close we all live to the edge.

Reviewed on 19 September 2017 | Image: Simon Annand

Theatre Review: Goldilock, Stock & Three Smoking Bears at Tobacco Factory Theatres, Bristol

This review was first written for The Reviews Hub

It may be July, but that doesn’t stop The Wardrobe theatre company from reprising its 2015 Christmas show, this time in the Factory Theatre.

And why not, when this seasonally ubiquitous mash up of Guy Ritchie’s 1998 cockney gangster film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels with the Goldilocks and the Three Bears fairy-tale has proved to be such a Bristolian hit.

Even if your recall of the original stories is too fuzzy to pick up all the self-referencing jokes, there’s still plenty to enjoy in this comic caper devised by director Adam Fuller and his four-strong cast. Goldilock (Emma Keaveney-Roys), a struggling East End market trader, finds herself short of cash and takes on a seemingly straightforward furniture delivery job for local mobster Vinnie (Andrew Kingston). Unwittingly, she becomes entangled in the seedy card-sharping underworld of gangland boss Harry (Harry Humberstone) and his sidekick Barry (Lotte Allan).

The four players blast their way through multiple roles as Goldilock seeks to recover a mistakenly appropriated chair from the dingy pad of three very privileged and drug-addled bears. Throw in a family of extreme Scottish porridge providers flogging hipster takeaway breakfasts and you have the recipe for multiple plot threads colliding with riotous results.

It’s all very meta, as Goldilock undoes her own storyline by questioning the physics behind the porridge’s drastic temperature variation and deciding her bed at home is more comfortable. Meanwhile, Ritchie’s slow-motion character introductions and card game sequences are ingeniously invoked with help from Edmund McKay and Ben Osborn’s lighting and sound design.

The cast maintains the madcap energy throughout, with only the occasional moment of quiet self-reflection pervading the succession of high-octane scene and costume changes. Keaveney-Roys keeps the complex narrative clear and strong while Humberstone excels in comedic physicality and characterisation. Harry’s ongoing bromance with Allan’s none-too-bright Barry is the show’s standout storyline, both hilarious and oddly touching in turn. The three bears – Winston, Rupe and Paddy – are similarly well-defined, with only the Scottish porridge makers outstaying their stage-time, never rising above the two-dimensional while seeming to add little to the plot.

Perhaps this is something to work on before the show continues its upward trajectory with runs at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and The Drum in Plymouth in December. It doesn’t detract overall though from a clever, silly and uproarious show that may be short on subtlety but is always long on laughs.

Reviewed on 21 July 2017 | Image: Contributed