STEPHEN JOSEPH SHORTS.
STEPHEN JOSEPH SHORTS - 1: DOUBLE BILLS.
Stephen Joseph Theatre, Restaurant Various dates in summer 2002.
1.10pm Each programme runs 40-50min.
TICKETS 01723 370541.
Review Timothy Ramsden 5,7 June.
Two's Company by Lee Hall. Performed by John Paul Connelly &
The Hope by Michael Chaplin. Performed by Roisin Rae.
A Day Like Today by Novid Parsi. Performed by Paul Boyle and Teresa McElroy &
Wor Tony and the Great White Shark by Alan Plater. Performed by Paul Boyle.
Mixed pleasures in two lunchtime double-bills.
Alongside their evening repertory, Scarborough's repertory theatre opens its restaurant lunchtimes for brief performances. It's a fine way of filling an audience's rainier days and giving new writers and young directors solo experience – and, as the best of this early season selection shows, accommodating awkward-length scripts by the established.
One play's limited enough by a lunchtime; these double-bills are, necessarily, short shorts, many of them monologues. Lee Hall's scarcely a novice, with RSC commissions and Billy Elliot among his credits. John Paul Connelly gives a beautiful performance as the cheery fellow whose mission to keep everyone – himself included – happy has led him to bigamy.
He's put a lot of effort into his chosen lifestyle – not least into coping with two devoted women putting meals in front of him. Connelly fully realises the script's cheeky affability, taking you along with self-evidently wrongheaded behaviour, keeping your sympathy when scrapes arise.
Michael Chaplin offers a female counterpart, the woman who mistakes her way into marriage with a dull farmer and finds the Vicar's visits suddenly arousing. But the well-behaved, consciously-shaped sentences have an on-the-page literary feel, something encouraged by Roisin Rae's beautifully spoken performance which lacks the rough edge of experience recounted.
Ambitious Novid Parsi runs to a two-hander, in a very few minutes running through the clash between a self-confident American and an Iraqi woman. They're sitting together in flight, and we know what that's likely to mean these days. But there's too little time to develop much is she/isn't she tension around the talk of suicide bombs, while the characters remain schematic mouthpieces.
Despite an uncertain Tyneside accent (and, at times, certainly non-Tyneside tones) Paul Boyle brings Alan Plater's deftly deceptive monologue about a trickster to life. Plater captures the essence of the Tyne & Wear approach to life, rooted in a form of survival which teaches you might as well be positive, and not take too much too seriously while you're at it. Every conceivable institution clearly exists to have the mickey taken out of it, including, it eventually becomes clear, an audience. This play's a treasure.
Director: Toby Frow.
Designer: Pip Leckenby.
Sound: Julie Davis.
2002-07-04 22:51:03