Brighton Year-Round 2024

ACT Graduate Showcase

ACT Graduate Showcase

Genre: Children's Theatre, Comedy, Contemporary, Devised, Drama, Fringe Theatre, LGBT Theatre, Live Music, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy, Translation

Venue: Lantern Theatre, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

July, and showcase season is coming to an end. ACT’s Foundation Year and remarkable Youth Theatre shows graced the two previous weekends.

Graduate Showcase this year went first to Jermyn Street Theatre on 11^th – a breakout moment – before two shows back at the Lantern, expanded from one to two hours with interval.

Eight actors took eight monologues and ten scenes. Lead directed by ACT’s Janette Eddisford and Daniel Finlay, individual scenes were directed by Mark Carroll, Graeme Dalling, Hasan Dixon, William Ellis (monologues and some scenes), Mim King, Hannah Summers.

The halves are evenly divided. Four monologues follow on from each other, at the top of the half or after one item.

Tom Basden’s Holes, a play about survivors, was performed by Dominic Hart as Ian with the right mix of over-sharing nervousness. Joseph Armone’s Contents Flammable has Inna Metlina as Nora unfold sudden horror about a child, and Elizabeth Thaarup’s Debbie in Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money provides disturbed light relief as she enumerates how she sabotages her firm, speaking with rapid insouciance. Finally Juna Elisa Gankofer as Madam Arcati in Coward’s Blithe Spirit is unperturbed about seasonal ectoplasm.

David Eldridge’s Knot of the Heart memorably dissects addiction and recovery. The scene between stage siblings Gemma Carter and Katherine De Leiros shows more than a flash of naturalist performance and some tension. They draw the right temperature from the encounter.

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman is famous enough for many to know the scene where the writer Dominic Hart is confronted by two policemen, Juna Elisa Gankofer as good cop and Adriaan Pel as bad. Here more natural, more nuanced interplay might help an already-charged scene.

3 Winters, Tena Stivcic’s play about a Croatian family’s survival has  Inna Metlina and Elizabeth Thaarup bicker their way through to a warm truce. It might not end there, as the laughter shows. It’s unsettling and elliptical, leaving tantalising question-marks.

Diane Samuels’ Kindertransport has mother Juna Elisa Gankofer fend off an increasingly furious Annabelle Turton, which becomes almost too charged too soon, but visceral and carrying a pivotal moment.

Tom Basden is one of three playwrights to be given two pieces. His adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crocodiles has Dominic Hart, who performed Holes, return as the listening bearer of bad news, indeed actively listening (a key quality in acting) to Aadrian Pel as an actor protesting uncomprehendingly in winning derangement. It’s as if Basden could hear Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (“I haven’t anything against your right leg. But then neither have you” to the one-legged man trying for Tarzan, which made my one-legged father shake with laughter).

Alice Birch’s recent adaptation of Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba exhibits more swearing than the original, though this section is relatively straightforward. It’s where the eldest daughter, preparing for her wedding and crowing her independence, is in for a shock: Annabelle Turton, Inna Metlina, Katherine De Leiros, Gemma Carter and Elizabeth Thaarup enjoy a lively ensemble.

The challenge is that if you don’t know this work, less is illuminated here: the watcher is projecting what they might already know of the characters. There’s a little physical cuffing at one point to give an individual kick to the scene.

After the interval the piece not presented at Jermyn Street (like the final two items) Snow White, involves the whole company. Everyone gyrates in a blocked piece of physical theatre. It relates the first part of the fairy-tale, Inna Metlina as Queen and Annabelle Turton as Snow White. Much effort has gone into this, and it might have been channelled elsewhere. Though rounding out the palette of repertoire to excel in, there’s a possibility of diffusing impact. It’s naturally sweet and the rapid changes are commendable.

Annabelle Turton speaking with rapid elan inhabits April de Angelis’ Hush, excerpting a monologue whereby a young woman laconically notes her sandwich business falling apart when a cockroach falls back into the margarine. It’s a mildly absurdist, quirkily funny piece (one of de Angelis’ first) and quite vivid.

Australian Joanne Murray-Smith’s Honour is wrought at a different level, and elicits from Gemma Carter as Sophie a monologue of hesitations, gulps and shuddering recognition, as well as speaking low, but not too much so. Sophie’s one of three women around the walking-out of her father (wife and lover also speak in the play); a vein of human suffering and identity is laid bare. One of the two outstanding monologues.

Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy was pioneering for gay rights in its time and Adriaan Pel’s monologue reminds us why, even in its brevity, where vulnerability is finally allowed its own blaze.

Alice Birch returns with one of her earliest plays: Revolt She Said Revolt Again where Katherine De Leiros in a blistering delivery, rapid and witty, gestural and fantastic, enumerates in an almost breathless manner the ways women have to navigate the 21^st century. Birch is unequivocal and this is both a terrific theatrical piece featuring unnamed women and in De Leiros a protagonist utterly worthy to portray one onstage anywhere. Spontaneous applause broke out; and fully deserved. It’s rightly the last monologue.

Katherine De Leiros takes the lead in the next work Playhouse Creatures, and April de Angelis’ second very different piece this evening, from her full-length play. Playhouse Creatures is about the first actresses in the 1660s. As De Leiros comes on quoting Lady Macbeth, effortlessly a reincarnation of Elizabeth Barry, the other actors cluster round: Annabelle Turton as a spirited Nell Gwynne, Juna Elisa Gankofer, Gemma Carter and Elizabeth Thaarup, the last two enjoying a final confidence.

Stephen Beresford’s The Southbury Child made a big impression in Chichester last year and this tale of a traditional if socially more liberal vicar turned on by his community for not allowing Disney balloons at a child’s funeral, has the qualities of Ibsen. Aadrian Pel as the outcast uncle and his sister Inna Metlina loom large in different copings with grief: desperate attempts to get back into favour, and a ferocious desire to see a child sent off in a way fitting to their life.

Dominic Hart counters them in good faith as the soft-spoken priest. There’s visceral acting, though in this tragedy where everyone is right, as Ibsen noted, some of Hart’s nuances strove against vehemence. It’s a slowly visceral scene, and responses are equally explosive.

Finally ‘From Now On’ from Jerry Bicks and Bill Condo’s The Greatest Showman is profiled; where first Dominic Hart then Katherine De Leiros lead off the company in a brief show finale.

A few outstanding performances here show what ACT graduates might achieve. Attracting students from all over the world, as here, ensures both a stimulating learning environment; though some challenges in idiom are inevitable.

The Jermyn Street cut showed the students by and large to best advantage, though in Playhouse Creatures in particular, and the possibilities of The Southbury Child aren’t easily to be passed up. A fascinating showcase, featuring actors we shall see again.

Published July 21, 2024July 21, 2024 by Simon Jenner