Benchmark at West Walls Theatre Bar
A Bench Under the Eiffel Tower
Written by Molly Edgar
Directed by Jack Lester
&
Wigs and Knickers
Written and Directed by Nigel Banks
Carlisle Green Room Club's Theatre Downstairs programme continues with two new plays facing the unenviable task of following the roaring success of 'Unholy Congregation'. Either by design or coincidence both Benchmark plays share a commonality with the previous triumphant production; both examining an unlikely relationship spawned from a random encounter utilising only two actors, poignancy and great dollops of humour.
Wigs and Knickers written and directed by Nigel Banks survives the comparison very well indeed. Set in a Oncology waiting room, Wigs had the potential to be a very dark and miserable affair with its chosen subject matter, but Banks wisely instead makes the focus of the drama the differing attitudes and coping mechanisms of its characters - upbeat Melissa and ostrich Catherine. For all the dialogue occasionally slips into a wikipedia entry or NHS information leaflet, the characters never for a moment feel anything less than real. The humour shines through and offers a very touching insight into a 20 minute snapshot of two women struggling through a very difficult and raw part of their lives. It's impossible not to be moved by Catherine's 'ignorance is bliss' response to her first screening result, or roar with laughter at Melissa's carefree retelling of the hospital's 'BOGOFF' policy to a pre-emptive mastectomy. A random 'class warfare' moment in the middle diverts attention momentarily - there's an odd feeling that this particular posh vs poor development was a thread from an entirely different script as it felt strangely out of place here - but otherwise the focus remains strong and clear. The characters have depth, substance and a story to tell and it is a pleasure to spend time in their company.
Lisa Moffatt dominates with her performance as 'been there, done that, got the one-boob-bra' Melissa and embodies the character with every fibre of her being. Every line is pitched perfectly to either wring out every drop of humour from the material or to land a perfect gut punch with an emotionally charged but never overplayed moment of poignancy. Jo King also impresses with her perfectly understated Catherine. Alongside such a force of nature as Moffatt it would have been easy to deliver an ordinary 'straight [wo]man' performance and get away with it, but King paces the piece perfectly. Hopefully she'll make a move to the main West Walls stage sometime soon.
Funny, moving, original and with two great performances, Wigs and Knickers is very much a success, tackling a difficult subject with a wry and light touch.
A Bench Under the Eiffel Tower written by Molly Edgar and directed by Jack Lester is a different kettle of fish entirely. In almost every respect Wigs succeeds, Bench fails, principally due to a script written by someone who has seemingly never actually listened to two people having a conversation. Edgar's dialogue is nothing short of woeful. Characters speak only in stilted question and answers or strangely prosaic garbles of melodrama, impossible to make convincing. Characters Jennifer and Daniel manage to be both crudely drawn and one dimensional yet still strangely inconsistent, existing only to sulk about their own lives, emote angrily and eventually, without rhyme nor reason, apparently fall for each other despite neither of them being in any way likeable or endearing. Neither is remotely believable as a real person and the 'will they won't they' that should be driving the play is instead rendered at best inconsequential and at worst thoroughly tedious.
Given such vacuous roles there is little poor actors Matthew Wood and Lisa Dykes can do other than deliver the lines and hope the end arrives quickly. Dykes in particular was trying hard to wring something from the script, successfully portraying the bewildering array of emotions the text insisted upon and is clearly a talented performer when not hampered with a thankless part. Wood, despite his extensive CV listed in the programme struggles to rise above the material, delivering a pedestrian 'awkward young man' and little else.
As Jack Lester's first piece of direction outside of university, hopefully A Bench Under the Eiffel Tower will have illustrated some valuable lessons to take forward. Chiefly that play selection is everything and no matter how much sugar is added a rotten core will never be made to taste sweet. Also that, if a piece is entirely about tourists at the Eiffel Tower, surely they'd choose a bench where they could actually see the famous landmark and not sit facing away...
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Monday, 12 October 2015
Playhouse Creatures - Carlisle Green Room Club - October 2015
Playhouse Creatures at West Walls Theatre
Written by April De Angelis
Directed by Eva Cook
My pen floated over my diary page for many minutes while I pondered and collected by thoughts on Playhouse Creatures, the latest production in an excellent season from Carlisle Green Room Club. Under normal circumstances I find opinions almost worryingly easy to settle upon. Rarely a fence sitter, I will merrily leap to one side of a divide over another supremely argent in my confidence that 'sod what everyone else thinks, I'm almost certainly right'. Certainly when it comes to the theatre, it's almost unheard of for me not to rise from my seat at the end of a performance with a definitive critique already forming in my mind. Playhouse Creatures however has me stumped. Which isn't to say I haven't plenty of opinions regarding individual aspects of the production, simply that for the first time in years when my friend asked me as we were leaving what I thought about the play I was forced to use a phrase rarely uttered in my vocabulary; 'I don't know'.
The play follows five actresses - Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Farley, Rebecca Marshall, Doll Common and Mary Betterton - as they struggle to maintain a life in the theatre as first of their kind. Principally a character driven piece, the plot veers from 'light' to 'absent', returning only when writer April De Angelis feels it necessary to remove a player (quite literally) from the stage via spontaneous use of witchcraft, pregnancy or age. This would be fine - a great many plays have succeeded with far less story to work with - but unfortunately as a character piece Playhouse Creatures also largely falls flat. Each of the actresses occupies the role of a acrhetype and sadly little else - Nell is young, pretty and ambitious, Mrs Marshall is seasoned, cynical and vicious, Mrs Betterton is an old pro, well spoken and wise, and as such despite the clear talents of the real actresses portraying these characters, none are given the space to develop into anything other than their initial character description.
Instead of fleshing out our pioneering heroines, De Angelis devotes great chunks of the play to seeing the characters performing other plays. I'd approximate that in total around a quarter of the run time was dedicated to these shows within shows, a technique that works well in comedies but feels out of place here - particularly as, in this instance, they were largely being played for laughs.
Which brings me to, in my opinion, perhaps the biggest failing of the play. Its tone.
I'm not suggesting for a moment here that all dramas should be nothing but serious and all comedies should be nothing but funny. Far from it, the best plays always use aspects of both in order to feel in any way realistic. I find dramas without any humour as tiresome as comedies that spare no time for moments of character. Meanwhile the tone in Playhouse Creatures veers so wildly and behaves so erratically as to render the audience almost uncomfortable. On the one hand we have a play more than happy to get a cheap laugh out of a well placed swear word (which, when used in context and within reason is a perfectly justified and effective ploy - even if it does become somewhat overused in this case), using ridiculous rubber snakes to raise laughs out of outrageous melodrama and, most effectively of all, almost every line uttered by the sublime Doll Common, to scenes of a DIY abortion, a woman fleeing from inevitable burning at the stake and a general undercurrent of all manner of suffering and woe. This shouldn't be read as a criticism of this production - both sides of the coin are well portrayed, the notable void between the two being more a fault of the script than of director Eva Cook.
Despite this inconsistency there was much to enjoy in Playhouse Creatures, not least the scene stealing performance by Jenny Pike as Doll Common. Her deadpan delivery of almost every genuinely funny line in the show had the audience in hysterics time after time whilst also managing the difficult transition from humour to bleak with consummate ease as she told the tale of her father and bear-pits. Sarah Waters also impressed with a beautifully underplayed Mrs Marshall, allowing her moments of righteous anger hit all the harder when they bubbled to the surface. Kath Paterson for the most part successfully channelled Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket in her portrayal of Mrs Betterton and clearly relished the scene describing the art of acting via the medium of a clock face. Michelle Crangle I feel perhaps suffered from a misprint in her copy of the script as for the majority of the play I was convinced I was watching her play the role of Nancy from the musical Oliver!, her "Cor blimey guv'na!" mockney accent certainly originating from a wholly different show the rest of the cast. Thankfully this didn't detract from her well captured more poignant scenes toward the end of the play.
As seems to be par for the course with Green Room productions this season, the set provided a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Few other amateur societies can boast a period set as intricately detailed with little flourishes as the dressing room, or as beautifully designed as the mural adorning the back section of the stage. In this case though the permanent set did provide a few difficulties. By effectively halving the stage space both areas soon felt crowded when all five characters were present which, especially in the dressing room, was often the case. Entire scenes would be played out with almost no movement or changes of position. A line early in the play remarked about how crucial 'stillness' was to acting - perhaps in this case Cook took the line a little too much to heart.
Even having put all of these thoughts to paper I'd still struggle to answer my friend's question as to what I thought about Playhouse Creatures. Which, perhaps, is no bad thing. Whether good or bad, theatre should always get you thinking and, despite the failures of the play itself, this production has certainly had me scratching my head more than any other in quite some time.
Written by April De Angelis
Directed by Eva Cook
My pen floated over my diary page for many minutes while I pondered and collected by thoughts on Playhouse Creatures, the latest production in an excellent season from Carlisle Green Room Club. Under normal circumstances I find opinions almost worryingly easy to settle upon. Rarely a fence sitter, I will merrily leap to one side of a divide over another supremely argent in my confidence that 'sod what everyone else thinks, I'm almost certainly right'. Certainly when it comes to the theatre, it's almost unheard of for me not to rise from my seat at the end of a performance with a definitive critique already forming in my mind. Playhouse Creatures however has me stumped. Which isn't to say I haven't plenty of opinions regarding individual aspects of the production, simply that for the first time in years when my friend asked me as we were leaving what I thought about the play I was forced to use a phrase rarely uttered in my vocabulary; 'I don't know'.
The play follows five actresses - Nell Gwyn, Elizabeth Farley, Rebecca Marshall, Doll Common and Mary Betterton - as they struggle to maintain a life in the theatre as first of their kind. Principally a character driven piece, the plot veers from 'light' to 'absent', returning only when writer April De Angelis feels it necessary to remove a player (quite literally) from the stage via spontaneous use of witchcraft, pregnancy or age. This would be fine - a great many plays have succeeded with far less story to work with - but unfortunately as a character piece Playhouse Creatures also largely falls flat. Each of the actresses occupies the role of a acrhetype and sadly little else - Nell is young, pretty and ambitious, Mrs Marshall is seasoned, cynical and vicious, Mrs Betterton is an old pro, well spoken and wise, and as such despite the clear talents of the real actresses portraying these characters, none are given the space to develop into anything other than their initial character description.
Instead of fleshing out our pioneering heroines, De Angelis devotes great chunks of the play to seeing the characters performing other plays. I'd approximate that in total around a quarter of the run time was dedicated to these shows within shows, a technique that works well in comedies but feels out of place here - particularly as, in this instance, they were largely being played for laughs.
Which brings me to, in my opinion, perhaps the biggest failing of the play. Its tone.
I'm not suggesting for a moment here that all dramas should be nothing but serious and all comedies should be nothing but funny. Far from it, the best plays always use aspects of both in order to feel in any way realistic. I find dramas without any humour as tiresome as comedies that spare no time for moments of character. Meanwhile the tone in Playhouse Creatures veers so wildly and behaves so erratically as to render the audience almost uncomfortable. On the one hand we have a play more than happy to get a cheap laugh out of a well placed swear word (which, when used in context and within reason is a perfectly justified and effective ploy - even if it does become somewhat overused in this case), using ridiculous rubber snakes to raise laughs out of outrageous melodrama and, most effectively of all, almost every line uttered by the sublime Doll Common, to scenes of a DIY abortion, a woman fleeing from inevitable burning at the stake and a general undercurrent of all manner of suffering and woe. This shouldn't be read as a criticism of this production - both sides of the coin are well portrayed, the notable void between the two being more a fault of the script than of director Eva Cook.
Despite this inconsistency there was much to enjoy in Playhouse Creatures, not least the scene stealing performance by Jenny Pike as Doll Common. Her deadpan delivery of almost every genuinely funny line in the show had the audience in hysterics time after time whilst also managing the difficult transition from humour to bleak with consummate ease as she told the tale of her father and bear-pits. Sarah Waters also impressed with a beautifully underplayed Mrs Marshall, allowing her moments of righteous anger hit all the harder when they bubbled to the surface. Kath Paterson for the most part successfully channelled Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket in her portrayal of Mrs Betterton and clearly relished the scene describing the art of acting via the medium of a clock face. Michelle Crangle I feel perhaps suffered from a misprint in her copy of the script as for the majority of the play I was convinced I was watching her play the role of Nancy from the musical Oliver!, her "Cor blimey guv'na!" mockney accent certainly originating from a wholly different show the rest of the cast. Thankfully this didn't detract from her well captured more poignant scenes toward the end of the play.
As seems to be par for the course with Green Room productions this season, the set provided a sumptuous feast for the eyes. Few other amateur societies can boast a period set as intricately detailed with little flourishes as the dressing room, or as beautifully designed as the mural adorning the back section of the stage. In this case though the permanent set did provide a few difficulties. By effectively halving the stage space both areas soon felt crowded when all five characters were present which, especially in the dressing room, was often the case. Entire scenes would be played out with almost no movement or changes of position. A line early in the play remarked about how crucial 'stillness' was to acting - perhaps in this case Cook took the line a little too much to heart.
Even having put all of these thoughts to paper I'd still struggle to answer my friend's question as to what I thought about Playhouse Creatures. Which, perhaps, is no bad thing. Whether good or bad, theatre should always get you thinking and, despite the failures of the play itself, this production has certainly had me scratching my head more than any other in quite some time.
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