Tezza's Theatre Place

How does one measure a life and one’s progress from baby to a corpse? According to Shakespeare, “ All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. ” The seven ages of man is a concept that resonates with many people, and none more so than the aged clown in Justin Butcher’s moving play   Scaramouche Jones or The Seven White Masks . Shane Richie, Scaramouche Jones (credit Bonnie Britain). The play starts late on the 31st of December 1999 with the white-faced clown Scaramouche (Shane Richie) coming down the stairs to his dressing room after finishing his last show of the 20th Century. Scaramouche has plans to mark the millennium in a unique way, for tonight is not only his 100th birthday but also, the final day of his life. However, before shuffling off this mortal coil, Scaramouche wants to tell his story. One which starts at the end of the 19th Century an...

Can one ever choose where the heart leads one? That is the problem for the protagonist in Tim Fraser’s  Candy  at the King’s Head theatre. Will (Michael Waller) is an ordinary northern lad. He’s young, OK looking and reasonably well educated. He lives at home with his mum and Great Aunt, has a pretty good job that he is good at and enjoys nights out with the lads. One of the lads is his old mate from school, Billy. Who has returned home from London. Billy has a band, and really wants Will to go and see them. Reluctantly, Will agrees and goes along. An action that will have a profound effect on his life. For the lead singer in Billy’s band is a lady called Candy, when Will sees her, it is love at first sight. Candy epitomises everything Will thinks of as the perfect woman and he is smitten from the moment the spotlight picks her out. There is only one problem, Candy is actually Billy in drag. Whilst Will knows this, and has no feelings – aside from friendship for Billy – h...

Occasionally in the theatre, a show is just a show. The audience, and especially the reviewer, can sit back, relax and enjoy the production solely for its own sake without having to think too deeply about plot-lines, sub-text, or any of those other things. In fact, sometimes you just have to give yourself over to absolute pleasure. And this was definitely the case last night at the King’s Head Theatre where I experienced the awesome  Schlong Song . Woody Shticks burst onto the stage in a blaze of light, sound and really skimpy ‘Daisy Dukes’ and delivers an amazing talk on gay life in general and his in particular. From his first stirrings of knowing he was different from the other boys at his ultra-conservative Christian school, through to an amazing and very emotional encounter with a closeted man in Eastern Europe – an area not renowned for its tolerance of man on man action. Woody does not hold back, both physically and descriptively in connecting with the audience and wh...

Of all the things members of the LGBT+ community go through in their lives, probably the hardest is the first time they decide to ‘come out’. Everyone has their own story to tell, and they are all unique in some respect. My own involved the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question, a famous male singer, and a very perceptive elderly lady. Actor, magician, theatre and opera director Freddie Brook has spent the past few years collecting some of these stories and turning them into a one-man verbatim show called  Just Don’t Shout it from the Rooftops  which he has recently been performing at the King’s Head in Islington. Over the course of the roughly 45-minute run, Freddie brings to life a range of individual coming out stories and demonstrates the many different approaches both the outee and the recipients of the information take to the news. There is the young lad who, in the words of his less than sympathetic parents, ‘ruined the family holiday’, the soldier who took on a re...

Simon Callow – A Christmas Carol – Arts Theatre – Photo By Laura Marie Linck. A one-person show needs to have everything right if it is to hope to succeed. A great script, fine staging and an actor who can grab an audience and hold them in the palm of their hand. Fortunately,  A Christmas Carol  at the Arts Theatre has all of these elements covered. It may surprise you to learn that Charles Dickens 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, has never been out of print. Over the last 175 years, it has been turned into multiple plays, films, television shows, operas, etc. It follows the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, a London-based moneylender, who Dickens describes in these immortal words as “ a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! ” On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his old business partner Jacob Marley who is offering Scrooge the chance to change and redeem himself. Well, I’m sure you know the rest and if you don’t then that’s yet ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/199366/victim-exploring-life-inside-a-womens-prison-review/ Louise Beresford in Victim In this, the hundredth anniversary of woman’s suffrage, there is a lot of soul-searching going on in the world. Companies are publishing their gender pay gap analysis and also looking at the gender split at the most senior levels. Finally, it is being recognised that men and women should be treated equally even though, quite often, women can be the stronger of the two sexes. And strong women are at the heart of Martin Murphy’s one-act play  Victim  at the King’s Head Theatre. Victim  is set in a women’s prison with two protagonists, a prison officer and a life prisoner who has a finger in a lot of pies. Both women are very intrigued by the arrival of a new prisoner, one whose crime both amazes and disgusts everyone who knows why she is there. Prisoner and warder come into contact a lot but the officer is experienced and knows about keeping the r...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/198793/banana-crabtree-simon-by-david-hendon-drayton-arms-theatre-review/ CJ de Mooi as Alan in Banana Crabtree Simon There is a wonderful newspaper cartoon I saw once where a man was talking to his wife and said: “ How is it I can remember the tune from a twenty-five-year-old advert but can’t remember what I’ve just walked over to ask you? ”. This sort of thing happens all the time as you get older. For example, I can sometimes sit for what feels like hours looking at the screen trying to remember what word I wanted to type next. We put these little memory anomalies down to various things. But what if they are the harbinger of something far worse than just ordinary forgetfulness? That is the prospect facing the protagonist in David Hendon’s play  Banana Crabtree Simon  which is receiving its world premiere at the Drayton Arms Theatre. Banana Crabtree Simon  (a fruit, the road he lives on and his son’s name) are the three words th...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/196487/really-want-to-hurt-me-at-the-old-red-lion-theatre-review/ When you were a kid, did virtually every adult you ever met tell you ‘ ah yes, schooldays, best years of your life ’? I know I got told that a few times. Of course, for some people, the days at school are easy, fun and enjoyable. For others, those that may be a little bit different, they can be your worst nightmare come true. A fact that is at the heart of Ben SantaMaria’s play  Do You Really Want to Hurt Me , at the Old Red Lion, Islington Performed by Ryan Price,  Do You Really Want to Hurt Me  is a one-act monologue of a gay boy’s time at senior school in Exeter in the mid-1980s. Starting in 1984, we follow the boy’s story as he tries to come to terms with his sexuality and becoming a man at a time when homophobia was rampant and the AIDS virus had become newsworthy, with media outlets talking about the ‘Gay Plague’. Fortunately the boy has a Walkman and, thanks ...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/191040/review-expat-underground-tristan-bates-theatre/ Political plays are all the rage at the moment and taking centre stage in the narrative is the effects of Brexit – even the Archers talk about it every so often. A lot of these plays irritate me as they are based on supposition as to what will happen once the hard/soft/slightly flabby at the edges Brexit goes through – something that nobody knows right now. However, for a really good one-act play about the life – past, present & possibly future – of a European migrant, then I can heartily recommend Cecilia Gragnani & Jvan Sica’s  Expat Underground  which I saw at the Tristan Bates Theatre. This charming one-person (well sort of, as I will explain in a moment) production is the story of Cecilia, a young girl who decides to leave her Italian village and, after a sojourn in Paris, decides to move to London to seek her proverbial fortune. We follow her adventures from the mome...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/189248/review-xposed-lgbtq-new-writing-night-hen-chickens-theatre/ Fluid (Jack O’Neill) There are times when I really wish I could write. Not these reviews but something worthwhile. They say everybody has a book inside of them but I’ve yet to find mine. As for writing a play, fat chance. Maybe that is why I enjoy nights such as  Xposed  which was a new writing night of eight short plays at the Hen & Chickens Theatre. The evening started with a play called  Fluid , written by Nick Maynard, Directed by Shafeeq Shajahan and performed by Jack O’Neill. This was a monologue with Jack’s character being a rough, ‘chavy’ boy from Bolton on a stage supposedly performing a rap for the eager audience – which included his mum, brother, girlfriend and friends. Only our lad has other ideas and is going to use this opportunity to tell everyone something that he has been hiding. Immediately the play started, my thoughts turned to “ oh great...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/188725/review-awkward-conversations-with-animals-ive-fcked/ Some things really should not be written about. If a writer has the temerity to write about the subject, then that writing definitely should not be turned into a play. And, if it is turned into a play, it should never be performed with the original title. And if all the above have been ignored, then we are left with Rob Hayes one-act play  Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve F****d  at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre. Told as series of individual monologues,  Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve F****d  is the story of Bobby (Linus Karp), a young man with serious social issues. Bobby lives alone in a bedsit with very few possessions and the first time we meet him, he has spent a night of ‘passion’ with a dog he met wandering the streets the previous evening. Whilst the conversation is one-sided, it flows rather well. Bobby is obviously an intelligent and articu...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/187131/review-three-mothers-waterloo-east-theatre-london/ Europe is awash with migrants. War, genocide, economic conditions and deportation have caused a mass of dispossessed people to be wandering around seeking everything from a new life away from fear to just somewhere warm to rest their head. The funny thing is, anyone reading this opening will believe they already know about the migrant issue. It’s on the news all the time and has become a bit of political hot potato. But, the current situation is not the first time Europe has suffered a migrant crisis. You only need to go back seventy years to find another time when migration was a major problem for the countries of Europe. Today and the past are at the heart of Matilda Velevitch’s play  Three Mothers  at the Waterloo East Theatre. Told as three intertwining monologues,  Three Mothers  tells the story of three women separated by time and space. First, there is Khady (C...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/179910/review-trouble-with-men-the-kings-head-theatre/ Sometimes a show can start a conversation just by its title. And this is particularly true of the latest addition to the King’s Head Theatre Queer Festival 2017 –  Trouble with Men . This 45-minute production consists of three gay plays, all written and directed by playwright Nick Myles and performed by a company of three outstanding actors. The evening opened with ‘The Farce’  Three Men and Some Baggage . In a regular flat, Fin (Freddie Wintrip) is getting ready for the arrival of his new boyfriend (William McGeough) but before he arrives, Fin is joined by his best friend Ray (Reece Matthews) and not to put too fine a point on it, stereotypical ‘twink about town’. Fin really wants Ray to leave before the boyfriend turns up but Ray wants to stay and check out the new guy in Fin’s life. When he does arrive, complete with a large bulging suitcase, Ray is instantly, and possibly unfai...

https://www.londontheatre1.com/news/171243/review-no-finer-life-pleasance-theatre/ Those of us that live in London or one of the other cities in the UK often have very little knowledge of the countryside. For many people, it’s the green bit either side of the motorway as we travel from A to B. Or it’s that picture postcard place where we take a holiday to get so far away from things that the nearest Waitrose is half an hour away. Of course, the countryside is so much more than either of these things. It is the home and working place of millions of people and supplies around 60% of all the food consumed in the UK. If you would like a chance to really appreciate the countryside then I would heartily recommend Graham Harvey’s  No Finer Life  which I caught at the Pleasance Theatre the other night. No Finer Life  follows the story of Elizabeth (Roberta Bellekom) a Land Army Girl who falls in love with farmer George Henderson was the author of ‘The Farming Ladder’ – pub...

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 ...