We intrepid reviewers have to trek to some remote spots in search of something to watch so Friday night saw me heading off to Brum to track down a double bill of plays I’d not seen before.
The Cannon Hill Arts Centre (as it was once known) has just had a reputed 70 million quid refit and it shows, with lot of open i.e. unused space, a spendy architect’s dream. Thanks to smokers the electronic doors let in a powerful draught but global warming will soon sort that out.
I’d actually forgotten the very existence of the Hexagon theatre, although it’s been there for nearly half a century. It’s a little gem, a cosy miniature amphitheatre just right for intimate drama.
Director Tracey Street has been very clever here in dusting off two little-known plays of originality and depth and putting them together to make a brilliant yin and yang of this double bill.
The first offering Out of The Flying Pan by David Campton was done in an unsettling Commedia dell’Arte style featuring white faced actors as amusing but sinister clowns, which really worked. The play itself is a brilliantly satirical comedy about politicians and power and played endlessly with the cliches and jargon of international diplomacy (“The gun is mightier than the word”) to show exactly what the rhetoric of power is worth. Here Ellis Creez and Ben Crowley as the two politicians turned in performances that were really national standard, supported by a superb ensemble. I’d be happy to see this again any time.
In place of an interval in an unusual interlude Denny Hodge, “one of the country’s top warm-up artists” treated us to a few jokes before the night’s second offering I Licked a Slag’s Deodorant. I laughed out loud when I heard the title, but this play by the award-winning Jim Cartwright is very far from funny, being the tragic tale of a Scouse prossy and one of her more vulnerable clients.
Again, more stylish direction from Ms Street allowing full reign to Matthew Recardo as the loser so vulnerable he accepts even physical abuse as proof of affection and an utterly convincing portrayal of the reckless prostitute who will do anything to feed her habit by the brilliant Fiona Allison. No moralising here, just episodes from two brutalised lives showing how even two such damaged people can somehow cobble together a relationship, however appalling. Powerful, dark and thought provoking, this was theatre at it’s very best.
I must mention the mood-setting music which was so brilliantly chosen. This was a master class in how to put on a show. Da Capo.
