Reviews

Director Helen Ellis does a sterling job with an excellent cast on Ken Davenport’s compilation play My First Time – an offering about losing one’s virginity.

Plays constructed from real life conversations are not new, and some of them have become classics.

The Laramie Project and The Vagina Monologues, along with The Exonerated, are at the upper echelon of this kind of amalgam. My First Time drifts somewhere down at the bottom of the scale.

It takes a quality production to win over a critic who goes in harbouring doubts over the quality of the text being performed. MBM’s 12 Angry Men, despite its flaws, is a quality production.

For those unfamiliar with the premise, these 12 in question are jurors, presiding over an American murder trial. The men are not named, only numbered. An accused boy’s life hangs in the balance, and they must all come to an agreement before he can be either freed – or condemned…

There is comedy, intrigue and psychological probing in thought-provoking work Do Something Else. Performance art devised over a year as a work in progress by Cloé Fournier, Ryuichi Fujimura and Brigid Vidler, directed by Michael Pigott, and performed at the Old 505 Theatre in Newtown.

As an introduction to my review of Inside the Bell Jar I would like to highlight the magical singing voice and piano playing of performer Kate Mulqueen.  Throughout the show songs and music play a part in setting a poetic and melancholy tone.

A graduate of the National Theatre Drama School and with experience in film, television and theatre Kate has gone out on a limb with Inside the Bell Jar, as she shares with her audience the most personal experience of the life, the suicide of her beloved sister Emily and all of the consequences surrounding it.