12 plays at Stratford Bear Pit Theatre’s One Act Play Festival showcased some great local talent
Review: One Act Play Festival , Bear Pit Theatre, 9th-12th April
By Peter Buckroyd
LAST week saw the fourth annual One Act Play Festival organised and smoothly co-ordinated by Nick le Mesurier. With three plays each evening, there was among the 12 something for everyone to enjoy.
This is a great showcase for new writing and for a range of different amateur theatre groups. It is also a chance for the few who took advantage of it to see what equivalent theatre groups are doing and to experience a range of writing, acting and direction.
There is no simple, foolproof formula for the success of such a genre and the groups made different choices, but there are a few recipes for success. Perhaps the most important is audience engagement with the characters. We saw many ways of doing this. Two groups – Monkee Dubonnet in Steve Farr’s Say Yes and Kineton Amateur Dramatic Society’s In the Beans by Benjamin Keyser – had the actor on stage while the audience entered. In each case something interesting and intriguing was happening: a barefooted young man sitting on a sofa looking at and reacting to whatever was on his computer in the first and café owner Peaberry (Lauren Worrall) writing on and then deleting things on her menu board in the second. This meant that the audience were engaged with and fascinated by the characters wanting to know what they were up to and why, thus creating suspense before there were any spoken words. It turned out that both plays were two-handers and audience engagement was transferred by osmosis onto the second character when she appeared.
Another aspect of success came when the situation is apparently simple but the audience is drawn in by characters behaving in different ways or by a powerful planted surprise later on in the play which makes the audience re-evaluate what they have seen. The information that both Trevor and Elliott are recent widowers makes one think again about their anti-French, sometimes xenophobic bonhomie and bad jokes in Roger Gowland’s excellent Banalites and the introduction of the young litmus paper Peter in James Harris’s The Profanity Department turns comic time-wasting and theoretic linguistic pointlessness into grim and dangerous reality.
Subtlety and a light touch is another way of interesting the audience. We have seen Charles Essex do this at the Bear Pit before and he repeats the trick in his two plays for this festival – Who is My Neighbour? and Recollections May Vary. His plays are situation driven but both cover a wide range of serious and important themes without being highlighted: poverty, homelessness, the lack of aftercare by the armed forces, financial double-dealing and hypocrisy, jokes about Guardian readers, some of the paradoxes of political correctness, for example, in the first and issues about the NHS, counselling, responses to trauma, abortion, damaging myths spread by the internet and social media, different responses to anger management and mismanagement in the other.
Sometimes it’s just not knowing what is going to happen that can fuel audience interest. In Sarah Campbell’s Moving On laid-back house clearance owner Richard (Dwayne K Dawson) turns out to be humane and caring in the end. ET Baker’s The Hardback Circle eventually exposes skeletons in several cupboards as members of a writers group gather, Death in Paradise style, for a final revelation. In Angela Dandy’s The Hairy Biker a 75th birthday party involves a range of odd things but then becomes a treatment of how easy it is to fall victim of a scam, except that the final scam is not a scam.
Two of the plays features ghosts but it takes the audience a while to realise that they are ghosts so that they are puzzled until the final revelation is made. Baz Stilinski’s Home seems clear at first as soldier Liam returns to see his brother Jack. Only at the end do we discover that Liam has been blown to pieces. Perhaps the ghost in Moving On is a bit more complex as her story only emerges towards the end and the play has a range of surrealist moments which leave the audience intrigued.
The final two plays were rather different from the others. The longest of the plays, Georgina Monk’s two-hander Set in Stone is in four scenes, each denoting a different time period in the life of the couple’s relationship. In some ways it is the most ambitious of the plays on view – more philosophical, more mysterious about the nature of the relationship between the couple, and more deeply rooted in some sort of spirituality. Georgina Monk’s Evelyn’s pessimistic sceptical scientist contrasts Adam Schumacher’s John’s optimistic world of the imagination. The audience thought the play had ended at the end of the third scene but Evelyn’s reflective coda was still to come. This wasn’t my favourite play; I found it a touch too long, but it is the one I have spent the most time thinking about. Many moments from the play are crystal clear in my memory and I can clearly remember several occasions where I was the most impressed by Adam Schumacher’s performance. What more can you ask for?
The final offering was Unheard, ten short monologues from the Bear Pit Writers’ Workshop, not a one act play at all though they were linked by the idea of voices from the suppressed or unheard. Two particularly impressed me, completely different from each other. Performed by Jane Grafton, Brenda Littlewood’s ‘2AM’ was fractured, fragmented and enigmatic. In contrast Nick le Mesurier’s Dust was very simple but unresolved, brilliantly and powerfully performed by Danny Masewicz.
