Tezza's Theatre Place

One of the distinctive features of a short play is that the writer has to introduce their characters fast and the audience have to make their mind up about them at once. On the whole, this works. A short play doesn’t have the time for huge character development so you are probably going to feel the same about the characters at the end as you did at the start. But this is not a hard and fast rule as Simon Stephens demonstrates in his one-act play  Country Music  which has recently opened at Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre. Starting in a car sitting in a lay-by,  Country Music  is the story of Jamie (Cary Crankson) a troubled teenager who has done something bad. He has stolen a car – along with various snacks for the journey – and picked up his schoolgirl girlfriend, Lynsey (Rebecca Stone) to run away to Southend. Whilst the plan sounds good in theory, Jamie has a volatile personality that varies between extreme excitement and violent lows, and is pretty unsuited to thi...

Beautiful Thing: Credit PBGSTUDIOS If you ever want to wind up a twenty-something, then the best thing to do is let them know how close they are to being a quarter of a century old. Twenty-five years is, in the life of a person, not that long at all, but in the lifetime of a play, the twenty-fifth anniversary is a perfect opportunity to give it a spectacular revival, and that is exactly what the team at the Above the Stag Theatre have done with their new production of Jonathan Harvey’s  Beautiful Thing . On a typical post world-war Thamesmead council estate in South East London, there are three flats next to each other at the end of one of the walkways, From the outside, these are nothing special, looking exactly like the rest of the building and the estate that surrounds them. But inside, there is a seething mass of stories and emotions ready to be let loose. In the first, there is Leah (Phoebe Vigor) a young girl, recently expelled from school, who spends her days listening ...

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 ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/179160/review-the-wasp-jermyn-street-theatre/ Lisa Gorgin and Selina Giles in The Wasp – Photographer Andreas Grieger I suppose I was very lucky at school. Although being short, wearing glasses and having ‘FA Cup’ ears, I don’t remember ever being bullied about theses things. Though I did get my ears fixed and once ‘lost’ a pair of NHS glasses as I hated them, so maybe things did get said after all. The point is, that whatever may have happened it was obviously pretty mild and so I’ve forgotten about it. I’m one of the lucky ones. For some people school is a place they go to to be tortured either mentally, verbally or physically. For them, school doesn’t end when they hit 16 and leave. For them, these events may live in their mind for years to come, and this is the premise behind Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play  The Wasp  at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Outside a nondescript coffee shop, two women sit and drink tea. Heather (Selina Giles) is...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/169857/review-natives-glenn-waldron-southwark-playhouse/ Boundless at Southwark Playhouse. Fionn Whitehead and Ella Purnell. Photo credit Richard Davenport Do you remember your fourteenth birthday? Funnily enough, I do remember mine. It was my last birthday in Essex before heading off to start a new life in Lancashire. For the three teenagers in Glenn Waldron’s new play Natives premiering at the Southwark Playhouse, their fourteenth birthday will be something they never forget. Never identified by name, three characters celebrate their birthday in completely different ways. For A (Ella Purnell) this means hanging out with her fashionable girlfriends shopping for an outfit for someone else’s birthday party. A’s life is about designer labels, who’s in and who’s out and how many ‘hearts’ every post on social media achieves. She and her friends are shallow, superficial socialites and would ultimately turn on each other faster than rats trapped in ...