FringeReview UK 2023
Influence
Stockroom Productions
Genre: Contemporary, Dramady, Fringe Theatre, Interactive, Live Art, Magic, New Writing, One Person Show, Short Plays, Solo Show, Theatre
Venue: Collective Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A superb debut show, Influence enjoys quite a long run and suggests that Stockroom’s an exciting fresh venture with its team of writers and actors. And that embedded with Collective Theatre’s acting studios and writing rooms provided, this company and theatre synergy is more like a gleaming hub where magic in non-magic shows is poised to happen.
Written and developed by Georgia Crowther, Chris York, Maheni Arthur of Stockroom. Directed by James Hillier, Designer Natalie Pryce, Magic Consultant Scott Penrose, Lighting Design Tim Mascall, Sound Design & Composition Simon Slater, AV Design Will Monks, Movement Segun Fawole,
Assistant Director Dylan Verley, Casting Annie Rowe CDG, Production Manager & CSM Jack Opie, DSM Fae Hochgemuth, ASM Ellen Schofield, Photography Hana Kovacs, Magic Props & Illusions SP Theatrical Illusion Design, and John Gaughan & Associates. With Thanks to Tim Reed
Till December 2nd
Review
The Magician walks on, he has tricks but increasingly a story around his nephew Kai. It’s not happy, but then generations of magicians, illusionists, conjurers and mentalists have their share of misfires and upsets. Things going wrong. So we’re going to be given stories, shown how it was all done.
Stockroom’s Influence opens both Stockroom Productions and the brand-new Collective Theatre off Hornsey Road, near Finsbury Park. It runs till December 2nd .
Though Stockroom and Collective Theatre are separate entities, the one’s embedded in the other, effectively its company in residence. And Collective Theatre are also Collective Acting Studio – a drama school.
The first thing to point out is that it’s an inaugural production from a just-completed venue with spacious bar and raked seating with 100-plus capacity. Superbly-appointed it’s just what’s needed in the area. Just ten minutes from a station that runs trains through from Brighton to Cambridge and all London between, it’s easy to get to but you need to know a way, which the Collective provide. And for the record (it’s not normally mentioned; this is the exception), the management team are also incredibly helpful.
Kit Young’s Magician strides throughout, a scintillating, confiding historian of his family and other illusionists, old photos backlit in Will Monks’ AV design on Natalie Pryce’s stage-design with flayed-back brick and. a variety of props (SP Theatrical Illusion) with handkerchiefs suddenly shot sideways offstage (magic consultant Scott Penrose) and lit to spectral effect by Tim Mascall. The period and other music in Simon Slater’s sound design and composition almost smokes with atmosphere.
Over 100 minutes including a 15-minute interval Young treads his way through storytelling and volunteers. Tricks include a psychic ability to predict what a volunteer, Lilly, will write, chosen from Kai’s beloved The Philosopher’s Stone, at pages chosen at random by the audience. Cards… Or imagining a favourite-coloured hat in the AV design and through direction arrive at the very hat that’s left when the design changes. Neat.
Now some of these can be explained, but this isn’t the place, supremely, for spoilers and this will be a shorter account than normal!
Young is persuasive, the volunteers surprise you, and the suavity of a show – developed by Stockroom’s Georgia Crowther, Chris York, Maheni Arthur – matches Young’s ability to connect like shot silk shot through your fingers before you know it.
There’s a discussion about Chekhov and a hommage to his and vaudeville theatre throughout, with a rule Chekhov made. Now universally adopted, we know what it is, very Russian.
This is an exciting show, with darker themes of mental distress, complicity, and anguish like a transference of suffering broached. There’s discussion of illusionism, its history and how it comes to a point tonight with a trick the Magician’s grandfather never quite completed. And there’s enormous fun when influencer Alia Al-Shabibi gets sawn in half, or actor Lilly Driscoll sometimes finds it’s all too much. Corey Fraser provides a few memories too.
I noted names of the young volunteers as they identified themselves: Oriel Bathurst, Jessie Gattward, Eloise Miller and Wesley Smith. Everyone teetering on stage or bestriding it deserve an accolade for knowing exactly where they are, and where we’re not.
It’s a balancing act melding an illusionist show with narrative, and other versions (like Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch at Brighton Festival and NT Shed back in 2013) have bestrid related territory; but again, not quite like this.
A superb debut show, Influence enjoys quite a long run and suggests that Stockroom’s an exciting fresh venture with its team of writers and actors. And that embedded with Collective Theatre’s acting studios and writing rooms provided, this company and theatre synergy is more like a gleaming hub where magic in non-magic shows is poised to happen.
