Arden Theatre School once again opened its doors to other local theare schools inviting them to perform their contemporary performance pieces alongside pieces from The Arden's students. Started only last year as a new initiative by The Arden, this second year saw a total of five works from three different training establishments.
Disappointingly, the evening audience was comprised by the vast majority of current Arden students, with only one discernible member of the general public, and little or no support from either of the two visiting companies. The auditorium was only half full too, so despite the success and brilliance of the performances, it did seem a tad discouraging.
The evening opened with a solo performance by UCLAN student Sean Goss in a piece titled, 'Fostered'. The piece was intelligently thought-through, but there was little or no variation in pace or vocal dynamics [we did have a gyrating body towards the end] but this made for a very slow and perhaps deliberatley thoughtful piece. However it was overlong certainly overstaying its welcome and was quite repetitive. In a nutshell, it was a mix of verbatim and multi-media theatre styles telling the stories of those who were foster children and those who were themselves foster carers. Hugely imagery-full with the strewn pieces of paper being the foster children and the peeled potatoes the carers (my interpretation) and also a highly stylised performance style.
Following this and a short interval, it was the turn of Rory Kelly, currently a student on the Theare And Performance course at The Arden. It was a story of split personality, of Jekyll versus Hyde, or perhaps as Superman versus Clark Kent! [the title of the piece was in fact, 'I Am Not Clark Kent']. Very cleverly put together and timed to perfection we were presented with a large screen above the performance area onto which we saw one version of Rory Kelly, whilst seated on stage was his alter ego. Using casutic humour and cynicisms to put his message across, the piece did make you think about this mental illness [DID or MPD] in a much clearer way, and was in fact a very strong piece of performance. My only negative criticism here would be one which I continually harp on about in almost every review I write when using un-mic'd actors in a relatively small performance area: that of clarity and projection. Seated on the back row Kelly needed most certainly to have been projecting louder.
Another Arden Theatre piece followed this; 'Friendshit', and involved two more Theatre And Performance students Georgia Dodd and Stacie Tilsley. The programme advertises this as 'a deconstruction of friendship', although I wouldn't entirely agree with that postulation. It was more an ode to the quirky qualities and uniqueness of friendship, something so fragile that a silly disagreement can mean two people never speaking to each other again for the rest of their lives. The most humorous of all the pieces this was also the most upbeat too. Two teeneage girls giggling and being silly not really knowing what to do except be sh*t. Not too long and well imagined with a strong and positive ending.
During a longer interval there was a site specific piece of theatre happening in the foyer. 'Hamlet Hands' again by a Theatre And Performance Arden Theatre student Dan Sanders, this involved him dressed entirely in white - including a white full facial covering, rather like a morph-suit. This nicely obscured his facial features allowing us to simply concentrate on his hands.. the idea behind the piece. Taking the famous 'To Be Or Not To Be' soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet, he learned how to 'say' this using British Sign Language (BSL). In order to emphasise this, and the complete difference in the text between Shakespeare's original and how it is 'heard' by the deaf, the origianl text was printed alongside him whilst he spoke the 'translation' whilst signing. What became abundantly clear here was just exactly how different the two versions are and how the 'bare bones' only are conveyed through signing, and it loses not only the flow and beauty of the poetry but also the choice of word. A further added interesting dimension to this 'experiement' was the use of paint. The three primary colours of red, yellow and blue were used, and Sanders covered his hands in one of these colours each time he re-started the speech. Obviously where his hands touched other parts of his body, they left their paint marks, and so by the end of this 20 minute interval his body was an interesting pattern of mostly black by now paint smudges.
A return to the main auditorium and a complete change of scene and mood. Visually aesthetic and detailed, we were presented with a tent backdrop and a square garden complete with plants, compost, watering cans with water, wellington boots and other gardening pararphenalia, as Kelsie May, Izzy Sorby and Keti Aspden, three students from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), took us through some horticultural therapy in 'Plant Club' [as an aside, I was rather waiting for the line, 'What's the first rule of Plant Club?..... but it never materialised sadly!]. Once again the three actresses here need the same note as Kelly: projection of voices! They were barely audible on the back row (of about 10 rows only!). There were a few funny lines in this piece - including my favourite line from ther whole evening, "at the count of one and not before"; but the piece as a whole was something of an anticlimax. Ambling on with litttle change of mood or dynamic, the short songs were, I am assuming, deliberately badly sung, and although the backlighting of the tent was a nice idea, the whole piece felt under-rehearsed and ad hoc. The 'message' at the end of their four-season gardening episode being that they were using the plants as metaphors for human life, and we are all 'blooming beautiful'.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 9/5/19
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