Skip to main content

Review of Flash Festival 2016: Him by Just Bear Theatre Company at St Peter's Church

Just Bear Theatre Companies Him tells the story a chance meeting between Happy and Issac

The above I got from the description of the show online. After seeing the show, I have to admit that I am still a little confused as to the main subject matter. What is clear having seen Him is that this is more of a standard play than you tend to expect from Flash. There are less juxtapositions between stimulating serious and comic content, there is little choreography movement and physical theatre, there is little tech. This is a play simply telling a story and perhaps therefore fails in what you generally expect from a Flash production. What is does, is well performed, what is says though is far less clear.

It gets off to a very bad start though as Happy (Jack Alexander Newhouse) is exchanging conversation with Her (non third year actor Jemma Bentley). Jack does the most heinous thing in a theatre production in an acoustically challenging church and performs much of the opening dialogue with his back to the audience. I have seen shows in the round of the Holy Sepulchre and this can be excused, however here in St Peter's the audience is all in one direction and there simply is no excuse for it. I personally heard most of the dialogue although at times it was challenging, however I was in the second row. I know others did struggle.

What this play does do though is use the church space well to perform the production. With the play actually set in a church, use of aisles and the door itself to herald the arrival of Isaac (Neizan Fernandez Birchwood) is impressive, giving an atmosphere perfectly as we the audience sit within the actual set.

The story though I have a lot less understanding of. Perhaps it is my fault, I am being dense (although having spoken to others who thought the same, I don't think I am). It is clear that this mysterious stranger is known to Lucky, however I don't think this ever totally becomes clear why.

Then we have Her. After the arrival of Isaac, Her is no longer Jemma, but a blowup doll. This offers much hilarity for the audience, and offers some entertainment (occasionally in the awkward way). However I genuinely didn't quite get what it represented. My first and pretty much only thought is that it represents how lonely Happy has become. He has created a fictional partner to spend his time with. This is the general thought for such a thing.

However does it work like this within the play? I just don't think so. What mainly doesn't work is that Isaac seems so willing to play along with it. I have no idea why he would not mention something like that pretty early in a meeting. So that is the main sticking point of the whole play not working for me. Then we have the moment that rather inexplicably Isaac one night sees Her in human form again, or appears to? That really did leave me puzzling.

So I hope to be told exactly what was going on and my apologies for not quite getting it, if it really is rather obvious. It was all very well performed despite a few issues and I do congratulate them at the very least for completing this rather strange little play without corpsing at any point. So that without a doubt is a credit to the professional performance from the duo. All rather strange indeed.

The Flash Festival 2016 runs between Monday 16th and Saturday 21st May, 2016 at four venues across the town. Details can be found at http://ftfevents.wix.com/flashtheatre2016

Popular posts from this blog

Review of The Time Machine at Royal & Derngate (Royal), Northampton

As the title suggests, Original Theatre’s The Time Machine , importantly subtitled “A Comedy”, takes the 1895 novella by classic science fiction writer H. G. Wells of the same name as its source material. However, while the name is on the show, those expecting a straight, or even, as suggested, comedic full version of the story, will be disappointed, as this often drifts, like the machine of the title, out of control from the source material. What we do have though is a tremendously thrilling couple of hours of entertainment, where the unexpected, is very much at every turn, and indeed at times, even unexpected for the actors on stage. Original Theatre’s  The Time Machine  takes the form of a play within a play, here all three of the actors in the production are pretending to be playing themselves playing several characters within the story. This allows for much of the staple of plays that go wrong to rear their head, including dysfunctional scenery and repeated sequences, here used in

Review of Benidorm Live at Milton Keynes Theatre, Milton Keynes

I arrived at Milton Keynes Theatre to see this touring stage version of ITV comedy hit Benidorm with a distinct lack of knowledge. Having never seen the show, my information stretched as far as knowing it was set in a holiday resort in Spain (the title helps there), and that the humour generally resorted to the cruder end of the spectrum. However, having graced the screens for ten years, it was clear that Derren Litten's show had garnered quite a following, and indeed it was clear from the reception of the audience on the night, that this following was pretty much filling the theatre. The plot, such as it is for this stage show, is very much drafted from an episode of Fawlty Towers , and made a great deal more adult with its humour. The hotel manager, Joyce Temple-Savage (a sharp performance by Sherrie Hewson) gets wind that a hotel inspector is in, and the scene is set for seeking them out and all the obvious cases of mistaken identity. It's thin and doesn't fill

Review of UoN Fringe 2019: Working For The Man by Naked Truth Theatre at The Platform Club, Northampton

When looking at the prospect of the Fringe performance Working For The Man , it is slightly difficult to work out who is the bravest person involved in this remarkable one performer, one audience member show set totally within or around the edges of a car. I guess I would in my case, say myself, but it takes some daring for performer Ellie Lomas of Naked Truth Theatre to also create a piece that offers the boldness that it does. Working for the Man is perhaps unsurprisingly about the sex trade, and explores exploitation and how, or if, prostitution is taken as a serious profession. It involves no live audio dialogue from performer Ellie Lomas, instead, she inhabits a purely physical performance, that is progressed by the use of a pair of headphones which you are given at the start. Across this audio are instructions of what to do. "Get in the car", "sit in the middle seat in the back", "open the glove compartment" etc, as you move to different areas