THE EVENTS

THE EVENTS
A Made in Colchester Production at the Mercury Theatre Studio Colchester 
06.06.2017
for The Reviews Hub


First seen in 2013, and inspired at least in part by the Anders Breivik massacre of the year before, David Greig's powerful piece has been revived many times since.
Dan Sherer's production in the Mercury Studio is intensely visceral, its impact enhanced by the intimacy of the staging.
James Cotterill's set suggests a church hall; a uniform, monochrome grey for the walls and all the furniture, fixtures and fittings. There are skeletal trees and creepers, also grey. Grim reality mingles with the darkly surreal. The threads of the narrative emerge gradually. The text is often abstruse or elliptical, highly effective, but making considerable demands on the audience,
The euphemistic “events” of the title involve the murder by a lone gunman of the members of an inclusive community choir. One of the many strengths of this production is the formation, especially for the show, of a choir that reflects the make-up of the fictional choir in the script, trained and directed by Scott Gray. They sing the chillingly appropriate Sound of Silence, and Blur's Tender. They have lines to deliver; they are involved in the expressive movement. Great work, community choir !
At its best, Greig's dialogue is moving, disturbing, terrifying. Claire, victim and survivor, fantasises about adopting “The Boy” - the killer – dreams of terrible revenge, of smothering him at birth. The young man - “a Europe-wide malaise”, a tribal warrior – lives out his first “berserking” with frightening force. Their meeting – the desperate “forgiveness lady” sitting opposite the nervous, awkward boy in specs, confusing Claire with some girl in a silver car – is utterly gripping.
Not all the scenes have quite so much dramatic strength; not all of the characters Claire meets – all played by The Boy – are as convincing as The Father or the racist Politician. And it is not clear why Greig conceives Claire as a priest. The character is strong and believable, the psychology underpinning it is entirely credible. But religion has very little role, and she simply fails to convince as a woman of the cloth.
Both actors are phenomenal. Anna O'Grady inhabits Claire's haunted face very movingly – impossible not to share her distress, her mixed emotions, her trauma. And Josh Collins – memorable as the young squaddie in the same team's Bully Boy here in 2015 – handles the very challenging role of the terrorist sensitively. Is he mad ?  evil ?  “empathy-impaired” ?  An engaging presence, he also takes on nearly all the other roles, with almost imperceptible changes in voice and demeanour. He's The Friend, The Journalist, and Catriona, Claire's yurt-builder partner – this detail one of the few, very welcome, moments of humour in an otherwise unrelenting study of the CoD enthusiastic who kills to protect his tribe.
There is a glimpse of redemption at the end of this descent into madness; new red chairs are unveiled, and Claire's colourless world is further brightened by the new choir, gaily clad, singing a capella “We're all in here ...”
production photograph: Robert Day

BULLY BOY

BULLY BOY
Made in Colchester at the Mercury Studio, Colchester

for The Reviews Hub

What is the dramatist to say about war ? 
From Shakespeare to R C Sherriff, playwrights have tried to convey the reality of combat. In our own lifetime, pieces like Not About Heroes and Our Boys have looked at the psychological aftermath of conflict.
Sandi Toksvig's powerful play, first seen in 2011, explores all these areas, while also examining the shifting relationship between two very different soldiers. Both of them have their demons, dark places in their past …
All the action is set in the heat and dust of a blind courtyard. James Catterill's substantial set [in the newly re-appointed Mercury Studio] has stones seemingly raining down behind metal grilles, basic benches. And body bags.
At first it seems as if this will be a simple investigation. A civilian boy has been killed in the Middle East. The major confronts the private, interrogates him about the incident, and the involvement of his sergeant, and his mates, the self-styled Bully Boys.
Eddie is a simple squaddie, joined up at sixteen, still only twenty years old. Oscar is older, a Falklands veteran, now a wheel-chair user. Eddie is casually racist. Stamps out the life of a spider. Oscar is more complex, sensitive and intelligent.
But then Eddie saves Oscar's life when their convoy is ambushed, and Eddie's mates are killed. Four “empty boxes” flown home to grieving families.
Dan Sherer's production brings out the differences and the common ground in the lives of these two victims of war. Sharing a bench, Oscar reading his book, Eddie playing a handheld computer game. Sharing a Scotch, climbing together to the top of Pendle Hill.
We discover a little more about Oscar's background – once desperate to be a dancer, he can no longer dance, nor even hear the music. One of the young boy's mystical appearances sees Oscar pirouetting to Pagliacci. And a little more about the boy from Burnley and the roots of his anger and his guilt.
There are some strikingly surreal moments – the relationship itself is improbable, though never feels so. And Toksvig makes sure we have plenty to think about in this 90-minute piece. The Falklands conflict has lost more lives to suicide than to death in combat. The soldiers we send across the world to fight our wars are often remarkably reluctant to fire at the enemy. And those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder often struggle to find the support they so desperately need. [Eddie seems failed both by the Priory and by ECT ...]
The two actors who bring this odd couple to life in this intimate arena are Josh Collins, fresh out of RADA, who captures the latent humour of the lad from Lancashire, as well as his inarticulate frustration. Fiercely defending his mates and the maverick Sgt. Payne, losing his mind - “away with the hills” - as Oscar has lost the use of his legs. Andrew French is the Red Beret Major, a man with secrets of his own, in a beautifully moderated performance. Pouring himself an elegant glass of wine, collapsing into the dust with a howl of frustration. We get to know, and like, them both as their stories unfold and their uneasy relationship grows amid the banter and the questions. The boy, Omar, also of course a victim of the conflict, is shared between Benedict Cable and Austin Humphreys.
The solo cello underlines the loneliness; the words conjure graphic pictures: the aftermath of the ambush, the boy running along the roof of the moving train, his world of war forgotten for a fleeting moment.

production photograph by Robert Day

MERRY IT WAS TO LAUGH THERE

MERRY IT WAS TO LAUGH THERE

Jubilant Productions at the Mercury Studio, Colchester

11.09.2014

for The Public Reviews

A Mercury homecoming for this timely anthology; the director and the performers familiar faces in this house. Devised by the cast and directed by Ignatius Anthony and producer Jules Easlea, the show mingles great poetry with the voices of the lads on the front and, in voice over [Anthony], the carefully preserved diaries of Captain K C Buchanan, who records with a dry, laconic precision the minutiae and the horror of life in the trenches. “Dull day with showers,” he writes, and later, “Beautiful sunny day”. For the death, and burial, of a comrade.

The simple setting has a small space for Him [Tim Freeman], mess tin, kitbag, and a small space opposite for Her [Christine Absalom], one of Binyon's ”familiar tables of home”, with a brief candle burning in the sad shires. And, strewn across the floor, diary pages and letters from the trenches and the home front.

This was the first British army to be almost universally literate, thanks to our belated emulation of the Prussian education system. Hasty scribblings from front line or field hospital made these Tommies the bloggers of their day, Easlea claims, and it's easy to feel the intimate immediacy of their words, even across a hundred years.

Their thoughts are interspersed with contributions from the great and the good – Kitchener, Ataturk, an acerbic A P Herbert. The women, who found a new freedom in these dark days, are well represented here. Pacifist poet Margaret Postgate Cole - “The Veteran”, May Herschell Clark's pithy “Nothing to Report”, Rose Macaulay's “Many Sisters” and Sassoon's German mother dreaming by the fire ['While you are knitting socks to send your son / His face is trodden deeper in the mud.'] And 12-year-old Inez Quilter, remembering the fate of millions of horses caught up in mankind's conflict.

The show's title – from Wilfred Owen – suggests a lighter side, and there is a leavening of grim humour from the Tommies themselves – Mr Rat, Trench Pudding and Ragout Maconnochie, the London Skittish, and Madame la Somme, accompanied on teapot and tin plate percussion.

Rich pickings indeed from the pity of war, from Helen Mackay's troop train “Will the train never start? / God, make the train start!” to Robert Graves' Armistice Day “flappers gone drunk and indecent”.

No shortage of Great War entertainments this year. What makes this stand out is the superb sequencing of the extracts [all scrupulously listed in the programme] and the contribution of our two actors. Freeman proudly remembers his great-grandfather, who survived the war, awarded the VC on the same day, a week before the Armistice, which saw Wilfred Owen killed in action. Not readings but heartfelt performances, simply presented, with non-specific costumes, back projections, and a bonus collage in the interval - “Postcards Home” - a film by Dai Vaughan.

Merry it was to laugh there-

Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

THINGS TO COME - MERRY IT WAS TO LAUGH THERE

Mercury Theatre hosts poignant performance marking the 100^th anniversary of World War I

Jubilant Productions present Merry It Was To Laugh There, an evocative reflection on WWI, using poetry and diaries written during the global conflict.

Thursday 11 – Friday 12 September

Weaving together poetry, music and diaries with archive imagery and pertinent facts about the lives of the men who were fighting and the women waiting for their return, Merry It Was To Laugh There is a newly devised, moving reflection of World War I.

Performed by two actors of great experience and depth, Christine Absalom (Radio 4, The Rivals, Under Milk Wood, David Copperfield - Mercury Theatre Colchester) and Tim Freeman (Arsenic and Old Lace, Journey’s End, Of Mice and Men – Mercury Theatre), Merry It Was is a must for all lovers of poetry, students of history and those who wish to learn from the past.

A devised piece, it captures the realities of war reminding us of the universal and enduring nature of the emotions expressed whilst acknowledging the unique and unimaginable conditions and situations of that time.

Merry It Was To Laugh There moves from the poetry of the early war and the poet soldiers such as Wilfred Owen, to the words of the soldier poets such as Woodbine Willy writing Trench poetry. It draws on the diaries of a serving soldier and gives a voice to those poems written by women who were finding a new role to play in the world while their men were fighting at the Front. It is an evocative, moving, and at times funny, at times tragic, depiction of real life experiences of the war to end all wars.

I was lucky enough to see it earlier in the tour - my 5* review here.

Merry It Was To Laugh There will play at the Mercury Theatre Colchester from Thursday, September 11 until Friday, September 12  at 7:45pm. Tickets are £12.50, with concessions available.

For more information, including performance times and to purchase tickets, visit www.mercurytheatre.co.uk or call 01206 573948.