Sunday, April 19

Take your seats please..

I keep intending to set up my 'theatre savings' i.e. do my bit for recycling by converting say, a finished coffee jar into a home for stray fivers, from which I can fund the odd 'best available' seat watching Real Live Actors! Gosh.

Instead I seem to be a bit all over the place and still not quite seeing everything I want to. I've never had the courage to go by myself either, so a lot of trips are dependent on finding a theatre-buddy. Since I last posted before Crimble however I've managed to catch the following:

No Man's Land
A week or so before Pinter's death. My first Pinter play, my enjoyment of which was only slightly dampened by the bored mutterings of “I don't know what the fuck is going on” from sixth-formers in the seats around us. The severe dampening award instead goes to their co-ordinated exclamations of “Dumbledore! Filch! Walliams-gay-in-the-village!” Kept repeating to myself : it's good to get younger audiences into the theatre through the telly/film link. It's good to get younger audiences into the theatre through the telly/film link. It's good to get younger audiences into the theatre through the telly/film link....... (Well, I didn't have a paper bag).

Blood Brothers
Gosh, a musical? Moi? Yup, went with the parents on one of their trips away from the provinces. And darn good fun it was too. My brother and his girlfriend also recently made a trip down to the Big Smoke and saw this. Their endearing reaction was of of immense surprise that the theatre was so busy – nay, full! - on a Tuesday night....

On the Waterfront
After I'd stopped sniggering at my good fortune to be sitting snuggly in the stalls with completely gratis tickets, I settled down to enjoy a heavily stylised, clean-staged production that had a lot of energy, laughs, and only one actor who's accent pissed me off. Good fun, and we'll never be able to look at pigeons in the same way again. And on that note, I think I might have to start educating myself a bit more on theatre theory just to give these reviews a little bit more depth...

Duchess of Malfi
A few days after the Waterfront  a completely different experience of a small production in a room at the back of a pub; the audience getting northern-line-friendly squidged onto a couple of benches. Some amazing performances by the BlackSun Theatre Group, even better for the proximity of the action. Most admirably the actors did not so much as flinch when the chants of the rugby-final fans in the main bar sounded up, and they probably got their own back with the lunatics-on-the-loose scene (no one would blame the neighbours for calling 999 hearing some of that).

What's next? Plague over England, Waiting for Godot...

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