RADIO PLAY REVIEW: Creature Features - The XV Theatre Company, London.

The London-based XV Theatre Company's radio play, "Creature Features"'s premise is actually much more fun and interesting than its execution sadly, despite the play boasting some celebrity names.

The sound effects and quality of recording are very good, but sadly Freya Alderson and Christine Balmer's script fails to sparkle. It is a nice idea, and had great comedic potential, but somehow, the script, and the performances, landed very much in the mediocre middle zone; staying in safe and comfortable territory.

An interviewer, in this case Jeremy Vine, walking around London, chatting live to the pets and wild animals that call London their home, asking them how they are coping with lockdown and if the coronavirus has had any effect on their lives. I realy like this idea, and the play really ought to have been much more funny and more insighful than it was.

Vine chats first to a couple of pets, a labradoodle (Veronica Quilligan) and a Blue Persian Cat (Lucy Briers), both of whom react as trite stereotypes. Vine then approaches a group of Urban foxes, (headed by Phyllis Logan), a Welsh duck (Kenny McNally), a Liverpudlian parakeet (Adam Leese), the stags in Regents Park (Eric Carte), and finally a wandering tortoise (John Rowe). One wonders what the Welsh and the Liverpudlians are doing in London, and why once again these animals have been given anthropomorphised caricatures which are staid and cliched. A piece of this nature would have benefitted greatly from a lot more boundary-pushing and allowing animals to say things that humans wouldn't dare to speak, and because they are animals, they'd get away with it. As it was, it said nothing that we don't already know and hear from our own kind. This is a piece of Fringe Theatre, and as such should have been experimental in nature, and instead we were given something that our dear old Aunty could have listened to with impunity on BBC Radio!

I doubt there will be many listening to this who will understand the "Fenton" reference either.

Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 30/8/20