This was the third Festival of Shorts that Pegasus’ Writing for Performance group has written, and was an impressive showcase of their skills. Ten short plays were performed, each written by one of the young writers, mentored by Jonathan Lloyd, then brought to life by teams of diverse actors and directors. After the plays, feedback was given by professional writer Anna Glynn, and by the audience.
The plays:
The Best Thing Ever by Louis Harvie, a young master of the theatre of the absurd genre. This play had everything: comedy, mystery, witty comments on consumer culture, multi-roling with cumulative costume, Steve Larkin on a bike and an anonymous object that could mix cement and had an evil heart. It was full of brilliant wacky lines and set in a world that was at once weird and recognisable.
Leaf F113 is Missing by Ines Cabrita De Jesus. This was a very effective self-contained short play that used the format very well: the characters were set up quickly and masterfully and the plot was simple, surreal and brilliant. Credit should go to the techie who cleaned up all the guacamole afterwards.
The Amazing Adventures of Mara and Florrieby Beth Cole. This began with an inspired playful 21st century updating of some familiar fairy tales to include satnavs, feminism, acupuncture, the WiFi code and Heinz Baked Beans. However, this soon darkened for the central characters Mara and Florrie as it became apparent that Mara’s steadfast belief in fairy tales was a way of dealing with other problems – until the magic began to become part of the problem. This was a really intriguing portrait of a friendship and explored the way children use play-acting to interpret the world.
Beyond the Eyes of the Seeker by Michaela Lastovicka. Set in Serbia during World War One, this was a moving snapshot of the life of a family and the effects of loss and war. There was a beautiful intimate feel to the piece, especially the interaction between Lara and her brother whose presence in his letters after his death was touching and tragic. The use of recording in the piece to incorporate foreign language was really powerful, and the writer managed to convey a fascinating feeling of mystique and simple honesty in such a short play.
An Exchange of Muck-Ups and Stick-Ups by Malcolm Myers. This play was the third of a trilogy of comic plays Malcolm has written for Festival of Shorts featuring the same characters, following the life of the owner of the world’s most disaster prone Café. In this episode, the writer took every opportunity to include puns and punchlines that had the audience in uproarious laughter. My favourite moment was the cake that had risen too high to get out of the oven and introduced the delightful character of Burglar Bill, who had never managed to carry off a successful burglary and was now wanted for wasting police time with his incompetence.
The Road by Leigh Bailey. This was a stunning mystical piece with nuanced writing that read like poetry, and used description and the physical space to create imagery that was much greater than the sum of its parts. One audience member commented that she could even feel the temperature and imagine the geography of the scene Leigh set. This was a spellbinding piece that had a legendary quality and left us full of questions. The old man (Alex Jeapes) was an unnerving character who had been written wonderfully.
The Haunting by Lizzie Bell. This was a tense play set in the Blitz, with a girl who’s been having nightmares and convinces herself there’s a ghost in the house. The play was brought to life under Angharad’s direction to create a powerful atmosphere of tension in the theatre as well as onstage, with simple but highly effective use of lighting and sound. The play was cleverly constructed – just as we thought that we had seen the ‘reveal’ and understood that the supernatural events were just the effect of air raid sirens on an overactive imagination, a twist in the plot made us think again.
Grains of Sand by Rosie Chalmers. This was a bizarre but fascinating play about an insomniac trying to recover and her creepy friend Leo who is obsessed with the macabre, with darkness and wakefulness and the Sandman. This was a really engaging story with dramatic tension that could be chilling and also moments that shocked or tugged heartstrings. The world was very believable too, with a genuine feeling of family between Penny, her mother and her sister, truly sinister tones to the manipulative Leo and a simple but vivid setting.
Home by Khadija Abbasi. This was impressively powerful for so short a play. Sara’s mum wants to move house to escape harassment. Sara is hesitant. We see a glimpse into her everyday life in which she suffers hostility and racism for being black in a predominantly white community, and understand that her mother wants a safe place for her to live but Sara doesn’t want to leave her best friend, a British girl called Hannah. The story was at once difficult to watch and uplifting, as it concluded with friendship and hope for change however small. Khadija also expertly wove common details of daily life with big issues which made for strong dialogue with impact.
Expeditions by Luca Sangiorgio. This began as a drama about Christopher Columbus as told by himself but then descended into anarchy as the actors rebelled against the unpleasant Columbus in a ridiculous, hilarious and chaotic turn of events. The character of Columbus was brilliantly caricatured as a nasty and self-centred glory-seeker, while the precious actor who was “not comfortable with shouting” and knits in his spare time delighted the audience. The play was written and executed to give a strong sense of real-time chaos, so that it was often difficult to tell immediately whether it was scripted or happening spontaneously.
All of the plays were performed to an incredibly high standard: including a few professional actors in the cast had a powerful impact on the overall quality of acting. Even more amazing is that each piece had had only two hours of rehearsal, yet the show looked overwhelmingly professional. Despite the rehearsed reading format, the scripts seemed to disappear, the plays themselves became engaging. The three directors, Angharad Arnott Phillips, Jonathan Lloyd and Robin Colyer, did a stellar job of taking the young people’s scripts and bringing them to life to be visually compelling and dramatic onstage. There really was no weak link here! It is difficult to believe that some of the writers who wrote for this were so young – the youngest being eleven – as they created scripts that demonstrated fantastic storytelling, imagination and wordcraft, and a deep understanding of what makes great theatre.