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.
This week's installment of Dramasoc's regular Monday night Open Drama Night slot gave us 'A Night In With Sam the Druid', penned by Ross Meikle,which incorporates several tales from his larger work "Crowning Glory". Sam the Druid recounts to his audience original fairy tales from his homeland, all of which focus around magical crowns and are told in pantomime-esque fashion.
This at least was the intended effect of the piece. Unfortunately, the show was rather hit and miss and sadly, the main reason for this was due to a lack of preparation of the script. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the character of Sam the Druid. The writer himself played the role and may have spent a great deal of time trying to make the character into an enthused, witty, scholarly figure. Regrettably, he came across as more of a bumbling supply teacher trying to get students worked up about chemistry. It was evident that the script was not solid enough. Many parts were improvised, and not convincingly. This led to the first half of the play to be confusing, with Sam attempting to describe overly convoluted stories to an audience who were increasingly perplexed. In addition to the story arc, the attempt to insert innuendo into lines which had none distracted from the already struggling plot.
Nevertheless, "A Night In With Sam the Druid" was not without its charms. Although I feared that the acting in the beginning was as shaky as the narrative, as the second half of Sam's fairy tales developed, several of the actors gave very good performances. The story of the crown that made the wearer invincible saw a genuinely creepy performance from Nathan Paulson that gave the play an injection of depth it had lacked before. Freyja Winterson played her roles with absolute conviction and humour when needed, whilst Jenni Hammond was good throughout, if over animated at points. It was in this second half turn around that we also saw the script come into its own, and saw thepotential of Meikle's work. When using the much simpler structure of the traditional fairy tale, the stories flowed much better and became wonderfully engaging.
Ross Meikle had a good concept and an enthusiastic cast for this production. Regrettably, in an attempt to make some of the plots more complicated than necessary Meikle lost the simplistic charm of the fairy tale, without replacing it with the intrigue of the Tolkien fantasy. 'A Night In With Sam the Druid' may have failed to employ the bawdy kind of humour the PantSoc do so well, but Open Drama Night is about giving new eager student writers and enthusiastic performers the chance to see their vision come to life.
The project had clearly been given a lot of love by the writers and performers. Meikle's narrative needs a great deal of review, but should be commended for contribution to Dramasoc's roster ofemerging student writers. (If you would like to read more of Meikle's'Crowning Glory' fairy tales logon to http://meikle-crowning-glory.blogspot.com)
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