Catherine Bennett resumes the weekly look at the performing arts world, with the sad end of Jerusalem, the luck of a cabbie, and French revolt. Do you hear the people sing?
Adam Alcock reviews Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and his own Four Elements at York Opera House.
Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
The evening was compered by the ever-ebullient Josh Giles, staking his loyalties right off the bat to PantSoc, and claiming this allowed him to give a neutral perspective on events (it didn't). DramaSoc were forced to start on a penalty of minus one points after questioning his loyalties, though with later points being measured in both the billions and in geese, this proved to be effectively pointless, if you'll excuse the pun.
The first game played involved all six contestants in a wonderfully high-brow musical about poo set in the sewers, with Chris White as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who battled Jonathan Carr's Sewer Monster, to music by Dan Wood. The performance was enjoyable and sounded authentic. Of note is the fact that four of the six contestants (Max Tyler and Rosie Fletcher of ComedySoc and Dan Wood and Chris White of DramaSoc) are veterans of improvised comedy, being members of ComedySoc's Shambles, and thus throughout the night were arguably able to deliver more spontaneous and flowing dialogue and actions. However performances by ComedySoc's Lewis Gray and DramaSoc's Jonathan Carr were nevertheless just as entertaining.
After this highly enjoyable, if slightly dirty opening, we were led through standard improvised games. If you've been to a Shambles set before, then the chances are you'll have seen most of the games in action. But naturally, with this being improv, every performance is different. Following the musical rounds we saw Rosie Fletcher's villainous Lady Subtext (a villain who finds sexual innuendo in everything) being thwarted by Dan Wood's “I Do Everything Backwards” Man. Another stand-out round was “A movie you've always wanted to see but hasn't actually been made”, in this case “Journey to the Centre of Eamonn Holmes”, which ended with a fate worse than death: appearance on daytime television. For me however, the highlight of the night was Josh Giles' narration of and the performers' respective enacting of “The Glass C*l*ock of Bad Shoeshine”, a children's story involving magical glass-mining in Ghana; a talking, rhyming, Jamaican armadillo; a villain who wears many watches (and tells such jokes as “What time is it? Um...watch...time”) and performers who weren't doing what the author said they should be, to rather hilarious effect.
The evening was technologically slick, and there were few (if any) hiccups in performance. One certainly had to call the neutrality of the host into question though, especially when ComedySoc were awarded points for a performance entirely by DramaSoc (though this was going on the audience's applause), and when the ultimate victor was declared as neither ComedySoc nor DramaSoc, but PantSoc. But with this being comedy, I don't think anyone was really expecting a cohesive scoring system. Especially one which involves geese.
For what it's worth the story is The Glass Clock of Bad Schüschein, and it's nicked from Terry Pratchett's book Thief of Time. Not that that didn't prevent shoeshining jokes being fantastic.
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