Behind the blank facade of one of the mysterious houses on St Giles, through a long garden dotted with apple trees and soaked by an unfavourable summer, in a small wood panelled hall with cushioned pews sat a dozen friendly faces. This was the meeting house of the Society of Friends, the Quakers, and the stage for a series of short plays and improvisations with no discernible theme.
Almost Random Theatre is the nascent creation of Chris Sivewright, formed in May this year, and Lighter Days is only their second performance. It showed. There was not really any cohesion to the whole event, so one of the actresses played some Einaudi on a piano, then improvisation was introduced, followed by plays of various (short) lengths running the thematic gamut from dance to dementia. In total there were eight actors and eight writers, some much better than others.
The first playlet was a twenty-minute piece about paedophilia and was probably the high point of the evening. An old man sat bent in a garden chair, an old woman watering her roses and talking to the audience. She clutched a Thermos and had a ‘nana’ smile – gentle, authoritative and kind. Slowly the story is revealed of the husband’s arrest and trial, of the woman’s ostracism by friends, neighbours and even her own family. It is an unsettling piece that effectively, and quite intelligently, questions society’s blind attitudes – rationality vs base instinct: our sympathies do not lie with the accused but how are we to treat the woman who sticks by him? “I think I could have coped with murder, fraud,” she says, “but this is the worst offence in the book.” Writer Doc Anderson-Bloomfield cleverly animated the backstory with two actors on stage reminiscing, allowing us to know a whole cast – the daughter, the neighbours, the judge – all of whom had only really been hinted at. Mary Stuck and Richard Ward, playing the wife and the husband, alleviated any fears that the evening was going to be back-patting am dram; unfortunately, they played their hand too early.
An odd but, thankfully, very short, very wooden piece about a Jewish girl dancing at her father’s grave followed. “Oh, why are you dancing?” the audience is assumed to have asked the girl, so that she explains everything to us. In fact, we don’t really care. It was colloquialism combined with bad poetry. A date in a restaurant, a man who is addicted to books, a walk through the woods: these three slightly limp offerings provided a moment of reflection on the nature of such short plays. It is difficult, but not impossible, to write plays this short. Situation is important – probably the most important thing because the play must be instantly engaging. There is very little time for in-depth characterisation or for plot, so situation and dialogue have to shine.
Lorna Pearson’s ‘Walking On Ice’ presented a series of cryptic exchanges between a frightening old woman and a frightening old man on a sea of ice. There were hints of something supernatural, there were mythic elements and there was an enigmatic script – offering another striking shift in tone. There were very few props throughout the evening, which placed reliance on the ability of the actors. Often they succeeded in setting the respective and starkly differing tones of each play, sometimes this was not helped by a lady with a very easy sense of humour and a very loud laugh like some kind of professional claque – although, unfortunately, exploding in a sonorous and ruddy mess at all the wrong points.
There were many moments during this three-hour marathon, surrounded by the friends and contributors of Almost Random Theatre, when I thought ‘this is bad’. There were many moments of mediocrity and sub-mediocrity, of battiness, of misplaced laughter and misspoken lines; but eight actors and eight writers had the chance, on a grey and grizzled Thursday night, to sit with kind, welcoming, friendly people and to showcase the products of their enthusiasm and to have fun. A new theatre group and wholly new writing inevitably offers a mixed bag. This is not theatre to watch, yet; it is theatre to be a part of, to enjoy, to get involved in. It is amateur, of course it is, but these are the roots whence spring the mighty tree from which the boards of every professional theatre are cut. Trite, but true.
THREE STARS
