Cloud Pleasers

UP, UP, UP AND AWAY!

Zoom, My Place, Friday 26^th June, 2020

 

During lockdown, we have not been starved of theatre, with plenty of National Theatre productions streaming for free on a weekly basis, and such.  This online production by Super Stories With City Actors (presented by Creation Theatre) takes a savvier approach by charging for access to their live show, performed on Zoom right before your very eyes.  But why pay when there is so much free stuff out there?

First up: it’s interactive.  Rather than plonking the kids down in front of a screen, and providing a passive experience, this play invites and encourages participation from its remote and divided audience.  In the safety of your own home, you can take part and do all the moves.  Don’t worry, it’s nowhere near as arduous as a Joe Wicks workout.

Secondly, you get to influence the story.  This fast-moving adventure, loosely based on a Hans Christian Anderson tale, involves Captain Calamity (Rowland Stirling) and his young cadet (Ryan Duncan) as they travel the world in a hot air balloon.   In fact, we are all recruited as ‘cloud cadets’ to go along for the ride.  And you get the chance to volunteer suggestions for magic spells and special salutes, and lots of things the plot requires.  But only if you want to.  No one is picked on.  It’s all “Hand’s up if you’ve got an idea”, so you can be as shy as you want.

Ryan Duncan befriends us from the off, as the plucky Apprentice.  He is our guide into the Captain’s crazy world.  Duncan has the energy and heightened delivery of a kids’ TV presenter, without being annoying, and he is a splendid physical comedian.

The versatile Rowland Stirling is the embodiment of silliness as the camp Captain Calamity.  He also appears as a slightly villainous magician, who speaks in rhyme and stands behind a moustache on a stick, and perhaps most delightfully, voices the leader of a flea circus, revelling in the name of Timoflea Charlemagne.  Which gives you some idea of the humour we’re dealing with here in the script by George Rennie – who is also hard at work, video-mixing live, which is like stage managing, conducting, and scene shifting rolled into one.

The music, written and performed by Jessica Dives, adds to the action and the fun. There’s a home-made quality to the backgrounds, combining stock photographs with cut-outs, animation, and green-screen trickery.  That you can see the join from time to time merely adds to the charm.  The combination of high- and low-tech elements works like a dream.  And it’s as funny as it is inventive.

The show embraces the medium to the hilt, presenting the story elements in creative ways, and it’s perfectly pitched at its target audience of youngsters.  You can see the engagement on their little faces.  And you can see the enjoyment of the mums/dads/court-appointed guardians on their larger faces, as they join in with the moves.

There’s a lot going on, and not just in the knockabout plot.  It’s about sharing an imaginative experience, sharing ownership, taking part, and colluding with the artifice of it all to keep the balloon in the air.  It’s uplifting stuff and worth every penny.  People have got to get used to paying for theatre again.

Subsequent Zoom meetings I have to endure are never going to live up to this!

You can book your ticket to a performance HERE!

The only way is up! Ryan Duncan as the Apprentice

Wonderful, Wonderful Life

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE – A Live Radio Play

The Old Joint Stock, Birmingham, Friday 7^th December, 2018

 

Frank Capra’s beloved film, starring Jimmy Stewart, is a Christmas favourite in my house.  Here it is brought to the stage in this adaptation by Joe Landry, who re-sets it as a radio drama. We are in the studio of WBFR in Manhattan.  WWII is over and we settle in to watch a cast of five perform the script using only their voices and a few odds and ends for sound effects.

Hosting the show is Anton Tweedale, who also appears as the villain Mr Potter (among other roles).  He points out the APPLAUSE signs, which we must obey – as if we need prompting to show our appreciation of this slick and effective piece.

The actors address the microphones rather than each other, meaning they’re always facing front.  Director Anthony Shrubsall prevents things from becoming static by giving them plenty of business.  You could close your eyes and enjoy the piece as a radio show, but if you did, you’d miss out on the darting around, the creation of the sound effects; the moves are all choreographed to keep the story going.

Charles Lomas is an affable George Bailey, the big-hearted hero, whose life consists of sacrifice after sacrifice to help the people of his small-town home.  Lomas makes the part his own, and brings great passion to the role.  Hannah Fretwell is sweet as Mary, George’s wife, while Marisa Foley excels in a range of female roles, from the local goodtime girl to George’s mother and infant children.  Rowland Stirling is superb as second-class angel Clarence and many other parts, demonstrating versatility and skill as he switches between characters, often conversing with himself.

You might think that with all the mechanics of the production in full sight, we would be kept at a distance from the story.  There is some of that, and you can reflect, Brechtian-style, on the evils of capitalism, as embodied by the sneering Potter.   But the story, even as it is presented here, still packs an emotional wallop.  George Bailey is a kind of anti-Scrooge.  It takes an other-worldly spirit to show him that the world would be worse off without him, rather than better.

Technically perfect, totally charming, and excellently presented by a talented ensemble, this is a wonderful It’s A Wonderful Life.  Even this old grinch was moved to tears – or perhaps it was the complimentary gin and tonic I knocked back in the interval.

Heart-warming stuff indeed.

Anton Tweedale, Marisa Foley, Charles Lomas, Hannah Fretwell, and Rowland Stirling