24:7 Theatre Festival. To 27 July.

Manchester.

24:7 THEATRE FESTIVAL
To 27 July 2008.

TICKETS: 0161 236 n7110 or on the door
www.247festival.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23-25 July.

Fine new(ish) theatre festival is stimulatingly eclectic.
Now in its 5th year, this week-long programme of new plays has been reaching for scripts for the first time beyond the north-west. It’s an admirable idea, more focused and distinct than the indiscriminate McFringe further north in concentrating on drama, accepting scripts by merit and having a manageable programme at central Manchester venues.

This year, 16 new plays are on offer at lunchtimes and in three evening slots (plus afternoon slots at the weekend. Each author has an hour (of the six I saw one ran 35 minutes, another veered to epic proportions at 65 minutes, but the hour is generally closely observed). It’s a good idea; long enough to stretch material beyond simple sketches or anecdotes, but not requiring all the skills (or rehearsal demands) of a full-evening piece.

Judging by my fairly random 33% sample, this year’s crop is lively and sometimes formally experimental. No outstanding figure demanded further attention but each piece had a point, and many showed strong qualities in their writing. The variety of subjects and styles is brain-whirling, their proximity giving the impetus and charge only a festival can provide.

Flights of Fantasy.

Even James Howell’s Lay Down and Love Me Again, the shortest and described as ‘a comedy storytelling’, moved beyond what seemed the easy targets of a rabid preacher, the Rev Rod, and the character’s family as created by him in his bedroom; its verve eventually also moves beyond the hit-and-miss promise of quasi-surreal verbal comedy, with some fine moments of performance, including the word “flew” treated to an instant of onomatopoeic wing-flapping.

There’s formal experiment too in Robert Shore’s Quadruped, where the apparent subject isn’t really the heart of the matter. Sandwiched between two contrasting speeches from a lectern, is a comic yet tense scene where a young woman makes her way into a theatre director’s home. Ostensibly she’s an actor, who apparently wants a part in his forthcoming Animal Farm.

The opening is easy satire, as an official spokesman defends government action over dangerously mutant burgers; the kind of officialdom that comes with a smile but is intended to rebuff. Finally, Shore risks a much longer speech by a horned creature that has made the kind of quantum leap humans made prehistorically, a phenomenon that came to light when a cow started humming Mozart.

This lecture is inclusive, the speaker wanting to involve her audience, though its length eventually over-tips the play’s dramatic balance. And, in the central scene, Shore and director C P Hallam between them allow James Quinn’s randy old director Lilley to be too one-dimensionally unsympathetic.

There’s still a tension in Lisa-Marie Hoctor’s Anne, a delicate-seeming Red Riding Hood with a tough eco-agenda, disgust and distaste for his preening evident in rolling eyes and curling features. It borders on a hostage drama, with a who’s-the-hostage element. Beneath the animal-rights surface, the meat of the play is the clash of ideas and an unseating of easy assumptions, whether made by Lilley, or all of us, really.

Taken from Life.

There are also several slices of life. Early hours on a park-bench overlooking the city in Kate Gilbert’s Watching Stars. After a session in the club for failures where Claire’s working and Matt’s spent the night, the two talk, she with an element of poetic fancy as a shooting-star flies past, he more factually down-to-earth.

But, as with Shore’s play, it’s the girl who drops the bombshell. Though the sex-talk (well, talk about sex) is the least convincing section of the dialogue (tricky subject in a much-ploughed field), it’s integral to the ultimate revelations. Yet at its best – which is a fair length of the time – Gilbert’s writing doesn’t need spurring on by plot. There’s a quiet reality to these two people, an outdoor, unformulaic Frankie and Johnny, dealing with their lives as dawn arrives with no promise of more than another day as before.

Claire Disley brings life and hope to Faith, until the final scenes when she becomes blank in expressive response to Nick Mason’s Matt, no super man but someone dealing with emotional complexity. They, and Gilbert, are helped by Wyllie Longmore’s assiduous direction with its attention to the script’s dynamics and subtly-geared changes in pace and tone.

Such sympathetic direction could have helped Ross Andrews’ Contrecoup. The title’s apparently a medical term referring to a shock to the system in an area opposite to the place of injury. In Second Nature Theatre’s production, Ian Curley’s Richard is a children’s author caring for his wife after the serious brain-damage she sustained in an accident. He has to fight father-in-law Malcolm, then deal with sexy new neighbour Penny, a pharmaceutical salesperson who has less of a drug-like impact on him than she supposes.

This is apparent at Amanda Leigh Owen’s shocked reaction when discovering how her seduction process is being played by Richard as a hopeful therapy for his wife. Yet hers is an honest attempt to help them both move on in their lives, while social worker Michelle chats away and Malcolm refuses to believe his daughter’s not mentally alive inside.

Richard Sallis’s Malcolm has Policeman written in his manner from the start, and he turns out to be an ex-traffic cop. The whole thing needs more pace and purpose (and at times audibility), while there are serious energy-drops in the several silent scene changes. A pity, for there’s solid material in the situation; it’s the kind of case where performance could act as a showcase for the writer to work further on ideas and character, then look for a more dynamic production.

Family Lives.

This goes for Richard Medway’s Lands End too, performed by RJM Productions, in association with DNA Performance Resource. A political fable, its eco-disaster world, with melted polar ice and much of Britain under water, sets a very northern-sounding family in Cornwall (now islanded, though northern England still sounds comparatively stable) where they’re visited by a government agent. They fear his agenda, but he’s isolated amongst them.

It all figures, but the figures don’t add up. There are fast-growing, though apparently amiable, alien children, who only want a human family. There’s a sudden-appearing mist that can create Bermuda Triangles anywhere in the world. And a need to make more out of these promising sci-fi ideas than occurs here, especially in a lumbering production where every morsel of menace is chewed over as knives keep appearing or the family repeatedly circle their visitor.

Yes, you inwardly scream, we get the point. In fact, we yell in our interiors, we got it first time, several goes before now. So, make something of it all beyond this anecdote. Promising material needs purpose and organisation.

A final word, from my sample, for Colette Kane’s Ways to Look at Fish. Kane takes scenes of family reunion – a grandfather looking for a son finds a grandson instead; his wife finds the son elsewhere. Facts seem to contradict, but come together. And reunion is the start of the problem for these people. Kane handles her material persuasively, and there are some strong performances.

Going from strength to strength.

With messages of support from several of the most lively theatres around Manchester – the Library (also providing ticket-selling services), Contact and Bolton’s remarkable Octagon, itself at the end of a 40-yearsyoung celebratory season - 24:7 is clearly finding and giving space to a range of writers (details of which spaces below). They might look to production as well as script quality for their next half-decade, but Manchester’s leading the way, with clearly appreciative audiences coming along with them.

2008-07-26 11:17:42