As always I watched the final curtain call with what I think of as a “Chickenshed lump” in my throat. There is something profoundly moving about seeing two hundred or so people on stage, celebrating a visually and vocally vibrant, totally inclusive musical theatre achievement.

This is a very original take on Jack and the Beanstalk, positioned a very long way from pantomime to which it is a refreshing antidote.  Jack (Hector Dogliani who doubles the role in other performances with Ellie Carroll) has a realistic family. His widowed mother is anxious, distracted, volatile and dependent on foodbanks or going without. A troubled dreamer and a bit of a loner he is badly bullied by other teenagers (chilling scenes) until he discovers the Beanstalk computer game in the arcade his late father used to own. The show then comprises his big scale working through three challenging levels until he finally “meets” the giant and comes to terms with his situation so that he can face the future with courage, confidence and self knowledge. Oh yes, Dave Carey who wrote this show is a highly talented man. And, primarily a musician, he also gives us some terrific music, partly live and visible on an overstage platform, and some pre-recorded. He gets lots of applause from me, too, for using a youth band.

The show, whose huge ensemble is beautifully choreographed, includes avatars, monsters, a colourful set, lively dancing (especially from the utterly splendid Courtney Dayes as Dance Boss 1), real drama and lots of kindness. I am always impressed by the glorious cast mix at Chickenshed including wheelchair users, people with Downs Syndrome and other conditions, child Chickenshed members, Btec and degrees students, and staffers, many of whom have been involved with Chickenshed since childhood. Ashley Driver, for example, who has been a member since he was a child, is a graduate of both Btec and degree programme and is now part of the tutoring and mentoring team. He excels as the forceful, glittering Pinball Wizard in this show. There is a given in the choreographing of Chickenshed shows that anyone who needs help is unobtrusively scooped up or taken by the hand and led within the ensemble. It’s a lovely thing to notice.

Hector Dogliani plays a lonely introvert at the opening, gradually and skilfully revealing a rounded, much happier person. And he sings beautifully – lots of tuneful, well controlled warmth.

This show works with over eight hundred people because the ensemble operates in four rotas. I saw the yellow rota doing a fine job. I marvel at the discipline with which they make their entrances and exits and can only wonder how on earth you manage a cast that size, some of whom are very young, backstage.

Inclusivity is what underlies all this so every word of the show is integrally signed by a large number of very competent signers who are threaded into the action. Some of these are children so that’s excellent too. I also like the way short solos are distributed across the ensemble so that lots of young people get the chance to shine. It isn’t always easy, given the crowded stage, to spot who is holding the hand mic and having a moment of glory but the blending in is a Chickenshed trademark.

I suspect that this is going to be one of the best Christmas shows I see this month.

Image: Billy Goose (Kat B) and Priscilla the Goose (Ruth Lynch). Photo by Manuel Harlan

Hackney has a culture all of its own and as a visitor from Catford, and the other side of the tracks – sorry, river – its pantomime always makes me feel a bit of an outsider. This year’s rather pedestrian effort was no exception.

We’re in Hackney Woods where Will Brenton weaves a somewhat contrived story about a beauty parlour, run by kindly Mother Goose (Clive Rowe). Then alas, acquiring a source of wealth from her pet goose’s golden eggs, she is seduced into the idea that she wants to be beautiful. And, of course, although she succeeds and gets glamorous, that is never going to work out well.

Of course fabulous Clive Rowe is good, sings strongly and, as director, does his very best to hold it together and Kat B, as ever, is charismatically rueful and funny as Billy Goose. Otherwise, I’m afraid it limps along with a lot of mis-pacing.

For example, there are several spotlight solo numbers which are well enough sung but are overlong for this context and feel like time fillers. Then there’s a very peculiar scene giving us the history of Hackney Empire – 120 years old this year – which, although quite interesting, is totally out of place here.

Worst of all is the way this cast – almost all of them – mis-time dozens of jokes so that they fall repeatedly flat. Even the slosh scene, which brings an “audience member” (I have my suspicions) on stage is tame. The timing of gags is a pretty basic pantomime skill so this is puzzling.

Rebecca Parker looks good (lots of leggy height and glittery black) and sings well as Demon Queen but her speech is blurred and often inaudible which is down, presumably, partly to her delivery and partly to iffy sound management. Tony Marshall is moderately funny as the exaggeratedly East End  Squire Purchase (and I like the punning name) and Holly Mallet is feisty as Jill Purchase.

Meanwhile the four piece band, led by Alex Maynard, is doing a grand job at the front. There is, for example, some lovely guitar work from Charlie Laffer.

There were some enthusiastic adult insiders laughing very loudly and supportively in the press night audience and relatively few children. The boy – maybe 8 – who was the only child in my row sat impassive throughout.

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  Billy Goose (Kat B). Photos by Manuel Harlan

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  Demon Queen (Rebecca Parker) and Full Ensemble.

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  Jack Goose (Ope Sowande), Jill Purchase (Holly Mallett), Full Ensemble and Young Ensemble.

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  Mother Goose (Clive Rowe) .

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  Mother Goose (Clive Rowe) and Ensemble.

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  Squire Purchase (Tony Marshall) and Full Ensemble, Jack Goose and Jill Purchase.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/mother-goose-6/

This is a show which exudes quality and smooth sophistication – none of which stops the children falling off their seats in wand-waving glee and gales of laughter. We get dozens of witty original puns, terrific music led by charismatic Chris Wong, fabulous dinosaur puppets, Jurassic Park references, spectacular dancing from a lively ensemble of eight and a rather good set with quasi stained glass changing colour around the proscenium.

Ben Roddy, a much loved Marlowe regular, is at the top of his game. His Dame Nellie commands the stage for every moment he’s on it. He only has to raise an eyebrow, flick his mini crinoline to show his underwear or name his stooge in the front row to carry every audience member with him. If he isn’t yet running panto dame master-classes for young actors then it’s time he did.

New to me, and to the Marlowe panto, is the impressive Max Fulham whose excellent ventriloquism skills this show exploits to the full. Not only does he voice a monkey puppet (lots of attitude and quick fire dialogue) but there’s a sequence with a talking fly and a very funny scene in which he confronts the Dame’s front row temporary boyfriend and gives him a hilarious high pitched voice –  poor chap. But if you will buy front-row pantomime tickets …

Meanwhile Carrie Hope Fisher sings her heart out as Carrie-bosse and finds all the right jokey malevolence. As a seasoned musical theatre performer she’s quite an asset because, of course, although the humour and concepts in this show are very enjoyable the singing standards amongst the principals are patchy.

Other high spots include Ore Oduba (winner of Strictly Come Dancing Series 14 among other achievements) bringing rubber-bodied panache to a very slippery slosh scene, Ellie Kingdom being sweet but feisty as Princess Aurora and Jennie Dale’s homely Fairy Moonbeam.

I admire the way Paul Hendy manages to present a show which definitely ticks the traditional box but also feels fresh. The ghost “it’s behind you!”  scene, for example, is different with a lot of stage business involving revolving beds which works well. And, as ever, for me the very best thing in this Sleeping Beauty is the “Barrow of Pun” – this time featuring the names of musicals.

My “plus one” at this pantomime was an adult woman who hadn’t seen a professional one for decades. She couldn’t get over how funny it was and chuckled all the way home. That, and the response of the children bobbing excitedly around us, says it all really.

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  Ore Oduba, All photos: Pamela Raith Photography

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  Ellie Kingdon, Ore Oduba

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  Jennie Dale, Carrie Hope Fletcher

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  Jennie Dale

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  Carrie Hope Fletcher

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  Ben Roddy, Ore Oduba, Max Fulham

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/sleeping-beauty-18/

Mark Farrelly is a phenomenal actor and writer. In fact I think his skills have developed even since I first saw him in action in Howerd’s End two years ago. Since then I’ve seen Naked Hope

(his Quentin Crisp show), Jarman (twice) and Howerd’s End again. And he’s riveting every time.

The Silence of Snow dates from 2014 and was, actually, the first play Farrelly wrote. It tells the sad and tortured story of Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962) author of plays such as Rope and Gaslight and novels such as Hangover Square and The West Pier. He was very successful when still quite young but was a heavy, compulsive drinker beset by the “black dog” of acute depression so his life was blighted.

Farrelly inhabits Hamilton totally and the intimate, almost televisual play is ideally suited to the small space of the Bridge House because it means that Farrelly is physically close to the audience who become the participative  listeners as Hamilton awaits the horror of an electroconvulsive therapy session in a hospital – a scene which more or less frames the action although there is also an epilogue in which we meet the dying Hamilton once last time.

He is very adept at slipping into other roles: his sneering tyrannical father, ineffectual la-di-da mother, a metal-voiced London prostitute, Michael Sadleir of Constable, who becomes Hamiliton’s publisher, and others. In each case there’s a subtle switch as, whipping off Hamilton’s glasses, Farrelly simply turns himself into someone else. The voice work is terrific and the sound is like music with more dynamic tension than a Tchaikovsky symphony as Farrelly shifts in an instant from  subito fortissimo to subito pianissimo – thus conveying turbulent mood shifts and many colours of the mind and memory of a chronic depressive.

He’s also a master of mime whether he’s affectedly puffing a cigarette, turning a key in a door or listening to an imaginary speaker. And – comic genius – when he and his first wife, who have “saved themselves” because “that’s what you did in the thirties” finally go to bed together we get blackout and we hear a hilarious conversation with Farrelly, of course, doing both voices. Despite the dark subject matter of this play, there are quite a lot of laughs. Farrelly’s version of Hamilton is very good at sardonic one liners.

In the final scene, still only 58 but “making Methuselah look like a teddy boy”  he is hunched, a blanket round his shoulders, dying of sclerosis and kidney failure but still sucking noisily at a whisky bottle like a baby with milk. The Beatles’s Love Me Do is playing to connote 1962 and it’s  almost unbearably moving. He talks with a slurred stutter – bitter, brittle, angry, disappointed and resigned. What a performance!

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-silence-of-snow-the-life-of-patrick-hamilton/

This fresh, succinct take on the best political thriller in the canon takes us to the turbulence of Italy in 1977 and respects Shakespeare’s “two-hours’ traffic of our stage” hint. All the clutter has gone and a cast of seven (four women and three men) tell the story with incisive clarity on a transverse stage. The 1970s projected archive footage fits aptly although the explanatory prologue is unnecessary.

Julius Caesar is a fine play and totally timeless. The politics fit any situation where there’s a dictatorial management structure and factions form to oppose/destroy it. It happens all around us, at different levels, every day. This version, intelligently directed by Matt Strachan, gets the message across with neat artistry.  There’s no soothsayer (although his famous Ides of March message is in) or Cinna the poet and many minor characters have disappeared.

It’s a production full of good ideas. After the murder Caesar (Malcolm Jeffries – very plausible and full marks for dying with one foot slightly off the ground and holding it until another character turns the corpse onto its back) slips into a seat at the opposite end of the space watching thoughtfully until he’s brightly lit as the ghost which haunts Brutus. The segue from Caesar’s death to his funeral is elegantly managed too. I like the concept of sending Calphurnia (Jane Withers) to war as Antony’s side kick, a conflation of characters such as Octavius and Lepidus, so that she becomes the epitome of a strong modern woman – looking oddly like Georgia Meloni when she triumphantly declares victory at the end. The cross gender casting is effective and there are several strong regional accents in this cast which somehow makes the play feel even more immediate and realistic.

Alis Wyn Davies gets all the decency and agony of Brutus perfectly as she tries to work out whether the end really does justify the means – while Eloise Westwood’s Portia is convincing as the anxious wife who isn’t being told what her partner is getting herself into. Cassius is a juicy part and Charlotte Whitaker really runs with it – arguing, manipulating and listening intently, convinced that her point of view is the right one: Caesar must go. The group of conspirators, usually large and individually named, is reduced here to Cassius, Casca (Mathew Rowan – good) and Brutus and actually, that’s plenty.

Tom Milligan’s Antony barely appears until the second half. Then he really comes into his own. I used to teach the “Friends, Roman Countrymen” speech alongside Earl Spencer’s eulogy at his sister’s funeral as outstanding examples of very deliberate crowd-swaying rhetoric. Milligan drives the message home with great skill – “Brutus is an honourable woman” except that in Anthony’s self-interested view, she isn’t. It’s a very charismatic performance from a young actor especially when he listens, shiftily, to Brutus’s funeral speech which comes first.

This is a compelling account of the play, well worth catching if you can.

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/julius-caesar-4/

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  Production photos: Elliott Franks

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