Tezza's Theatre Place

Blueberry Toast prod images. Adrianna Bertola and Matt Barkley. Credit Helen Maybanks & Soho Theatre. Back in the day, many toys were operated by a clockwork mechanism, You would wind the key, feeling the spring inside tighten up until it would go no more, then push a button, the spring was released and the toy would charge off doing whatever it was supposed to do. I mention this because the idea of winding a mechanism until it goes off is at the heart of Mary Laws’ play Blueberry Toast which is receiving its European premiere at the Soho Theatre. On a normal Sunday morning, poetry teacher Walt (Gareth David-Lloyd) is marking texts in the kitchen of his lovely suburban home. His doting wife Barb (Gala Gordon) has asked him what he would like for breakfast and, having got his order, has started to make him blueberry toast. Whilst breakfast is beig prepared, the couple’s children, the whimsically named Jack (Matt Barkley) and Jill (Adrianna Bertola), are working on a four-act pl...

Into the Woods (photo by David Ovenden) I have a tendency to overanalyse things. This can be a huge mistake, particularly in regards to fairy stories. Why? You may ask. Well, most fairy stories are actually quite nasty. Death, destruction and humiliation are often at their heart, The saving grace is that they always finish with a happy ending, or do they? Well, pop along to the Cockpit Theatre for an evening of Sondheim with  Into The Woods . The musical starts with an introduction from the Narrator (Jordan Michael Todd) who introduces the audience to the various protagonists in the story. First, we have a wistful Cinderella (Abigail Carter-Simpson), unhappy since the death of her mother (Christina Thornton ). Her father has remarried and brought his new wife (Mary Lincoln) and her two daughters Florinda (Macey Cherrett) and Lucinda (Francesca Pim) into her life. Next is Jack (Jamie O’Donnell) and his young mother (Madeleine MacMahon), living on the breadline with a cow that do...

The Night Alive Have you ever been banjaxed? I first heard that word a good many years ago when Terry Wogan used it in his radio show. It’s a good Irish word meaning among other things confounded. The reason I mention this is because I was left feeling banjaxed after seeing Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive at the Jack Studio Theatre in Brockley Tommy (David Cox) is in his early fifties. He is a bit of a jack-the-lad but he is also lonely. He is estranged from his wife and kids and is currently living in a little room in the house owned by his uncle Maurice (Dan Armour). Tommy doesn’t really work in the conventional sense of the word. He has a van and, with the help of his friend Doc (Eoin Lynch), he makes some sort of living doing odd jobs and moving things for people. Doc and Tommy rub along just fine until one night when Tommy rescues a young girl called Aimee (Bethan Boxall) from being beaten and takes her home, which like Tommy himself, may not be much to look at but is at lea...

Laura Pitt-Pulford (Melanie), Jonathan Cake (Frank). by Manuel Harlan Job interviews are horrible. It doesn’t matter how many you have been through, they are always terrifying, And these days, the higher the position, the more difficult the interview process. Of course, the important thing is how much do you want the job? And this is where the ultimate interview comes in, which is the subject of Jordi Galceran’s play – translated by Anne García-Romero and Mark St. Germain –  The Grönholm Method  at the Menier Chocolate Factory. On the 11th floor of a Manhattan building sits a small meeting/reception room. It is nicely furnished, with chrome and leather chairs that look good but are, like most corporate offices, prob\bly very uncomfortable. Floor to ceiling windows look out over ‘downtown’ and on a table in the seating area sits four glasses and four bottles of water. Only one chair is currently occupied, and that is by a besuited man called Frank (Jonathan Cake). He is not...

Left to Right: Eleri Jones, Isaura Barbé-Brown The concept of robots has been around for thousands of years. Basically, since humans first learned how to work, they started thinking about ways of getting out of it by having some device do the work for them. Since then, technology has moved on and these days, either directly or indirectly, robots are a part of our lives. Already, there is a hotel in Japan staffed with robots and how long will it be before we get our automated friends to do everything that we would rather not? A question that is examined in Nessah Muthy’s one-act play  Sex With Robots and Other Devices , part of the Sex Season at the King’s Head Theatre. The show – performed by Isaura Barbé-Brown, Deshaye Gale and Eleri Jones – sees a future where ordering a totally realistic sex robot is as easy as getting a takeaway delivered. Each scene shows the interaction of human or humans with their own personal robot, and we get an idea as to why they have decided to go ...

Athena Stevens and Jonathan McGuinness – Photo by Stephen Cummiskey Playwrights like to manipulate people. When they pen a show, they will write certain characters from certain angles in order to get the audience to feel a certain way about them. Sometimes, this is just something that happens, based on where the show is meant to go. Sometimes though, this audience manipulation is a deliberate act on the part of a playwright determined to make the audience think a certain way. A prime example of this can be found in Athena Stevens play  Schism  which has just opened at the Park Theatre. Schism  is the story of two people and their twenty-year relationship together. It starts back in Chicago in 1998 where failed architect turned maths teacher Harrison (Jonathan McGuinness) is contemplating suicide in his small house. As the radio fills the air with the ‘wise words’ of Shumaker, Harrison starts to swallow tablets. He goes on doing this until he is suddenly interrupted by...

A sockful of custard Between 1951 and 1960, once a week virtually every radio set was tuned to the BBC Home Service and families would sit around listening to the madcap stories being transmitted on The Goon Show. At the heart of the show was one man, a comic genius by the name of Spike Milligan. For many youngsters, this name may not instantly draw gasps of recognition, but Spike was a comic genius of the first order and it was a sad day when he died in 2002. However, if you missed him, there is a chance to get a feel for the man with  A Sockful of Custard  at the Pleasance Theatre in Islington. A Sockful of Custard  is the work of Chris Larner and Jeremy Stockwell, two men who definitely know their Milligan. It is not a documentary by any means, but takes the audience from Spike’s early life in India, through to the family moving to the UK, his part in World War II – or as Spike memorably called in in his autobiography “Hitler, my part in his Downfall” – and on t...

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) I never knew but the Barbican is built over a piece of land that was laid bare by the actions of the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. In fact, so many bombs were dropped on the area, that nobody is sure if they have all gone off yet. Sitting under the wonderful piece of brutalist architecture could be a surprise, primed and ready to change the face of London once more. This then was the starting point for  Split Britches Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)  at the Barbican. As this is a sort of immersive production and, by its very nature, every show is different, there is not much I can tell you about the show but let’s see how far I can go without giving away any spoilers. When you first enter The Pit, the scene in front of you will be very familiar – especially to fans of Stanley Kubrick movies. Basically, you will be entering into the war room from. A circle of white tables with lights over them and three large video screens above is the area wh...

Andrea Miller, Emily Jane Kerr, Christian James, Tori Allen-Martin, Prince Plockey and Christopher Lyne in H.R.Haitch (Credit of Nick Rutter) Back, in the midsts of time, royal weddings were so easy. The reigning monarch would check their progeny and marry them off to another monarch’s child thus securing alliances and securing their own future. Love was never a feature of the deal but if it happened between the youngsters then that was just an added bonus. Nowadays, prince and princesses of the realm, lead a more normal life. They go off to school, university and then jobs. They get to meet and mix with, ordinary members of the public and, who knows, maybe they even get to fall in love all by themselves. This then is the central premise behind  H. R. Haitch  which recently opened at the Union Theatre. London 2011 and revolution is in the air. The coalition government has fallen and there is a new party in charge under a new Prime Minister Nathan (Prince Plockey). One of ...

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Pippin: Credit Michael Smith In the year 769, the great King Charlemagne welcomed his first born son into the world. Quite a lot is known about the child, but this is not some boring history lesson, as in the mid-1960s composer Stephen Schwartz decided the son’s story was an ideal subject for a musical. A few years later, and with a book a by Roger O. Hirson, the show was born. Its name is  Pippin  and is currently being given a well deserved run out by Sedos at the Bridewell Theatre. Narrated by the Leading Player (Corin Miller), this is the story of young Pippin (Joe Thompson-Oubari) and his travels as he tries to find out where he belongs in the world. Yes, he is the eldest son of Charlemagne (Kris Webb) and heir to the throne – much to the annoyance of his stepmother Fastrada (Vicky Terry) and half-brother Lewis (Paul Nicholas Dyke) – but he feels there should be more to his life than this. Having completed university, Pippin sets out to find his place. He tries bei...

Open Clasp Snake Coercive controlling domestic abuse may not sound like a good subject to turn into an entertainment for the masses. When the play is based on real-life stories from women that have suffered and survived such abuse, then it starts to sound even less like something I would want to see. However, being nothing if not professional, I went along to the Soho Theatre to see Open Clasp’s production  Rattle Snake . In a cube-shaped stage, two women sit at a dinner table facing each other. They don’t speak to each other but they are interacting by carrying out a set of what looks like ritual moves with the glasses on the table. As they get faster, one of the women makes a mistake and the two freeze, looking around in fear, waiting for something or someone to react to the mistake. When nothing happens, the two relax slightly, then start again. After a while, they stand and talk to the audience. We learn that they are Suzy (Christina Berriman Dawson) and Jen (Eilidh Talman...

Seeing work by new theatre companies is always exciting. So I was happy to head off to Styx, the new home of Theatre N16, to see  143 , the first production by Tiny Theatre Company. The numbers here refer to 1 writer (Isabelle Stokes), 4 actors (Olivia May Roebuck, Alexandra Brailsford, Aizaac Sidhu and Danny Merrill) and 3 plays. The first of which was  Pearl with Alexandra and Danny as Ava and Daniel respectively. Two young people who meet through a friend of a friend and somehow hit it off, despite Ava’s intense dislike of Daniel – not to mention his reputation of which he seems inordinately proud. Told as a series of inner monologues being shared with the audience, we follow their relationship from its very shaky beginnings through to the realities of living together and the fears that can become overwhelming when two people are together. The couple are not really suited, Ava is practical and logical, whilst Danny is a bit of a dreamer who always hopes that pro...

Sweeney Todd: Production photo by Stephen Russell. Sometimes we all want a piece of fiction to be true. Let’s be honest for years, politicians have been getting the two mixed up for years. However, there are stories, which seem to have entered folklore to the point where it is difficult to know if they are real or just the product of an author’s imagination. Once such tale is  Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street , which started life as a Penny Dreadful back in 1846 and has been re-written, turned into a play, a musical and a film. Various productions of the musical have been put on both here and over the pond, and I recently caught the latest, from Geoids Musical Theatre at the Stockwell Playhouse. It’s 1846 and two men are returning to London after an absence of some time. One is a sailor by the name of Anthony Hope (Richard Upton) and the other is a man he rescued from the sea. A mysterious and very intense man by the name of Sweeney Todd (Thomas Isherwood) who ha...

Kes at Jack Studio Theatre Back in my school days, I, along with everyone else had to read a book called ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines. At the time, I thought it was an okay book, but I didn’t really think too much about it. The book was made into a film by Ken Loach in 1969 and finally a play by Robert Alan Evans which is currently being presented at the Jack Studio Theatre in Brockley. A middle-aged man (Rob Pomfret) is troubled. images, sounds and memories are racing through his mind, taking him back to his childhood, in a northern mining town in the late 1960s. We travel back in time with him to a milestone day in his younger life when he was plain Billy Casper (Simon Stallard) a fifteen-year-old boy from a working-class home, with a brother down the mines, a flighty mother and an absent father. By any standards, Billy’s life is pretty bleak. School is horrendous for the young lad, and there is little to look forward to when he leaves and faces a future, like so many ...