Slamalogue at Sweet Venues in Brighton has the feel of a theatre night that has not been over polished out of recognition. It is built around a simple format. Performers bring short monologues from existing plays, usually around two to three minutes, and present them to an audience who then help decide the winner. Sweet describes it as a monologue slam rather than a full showcase, and that matters because the evening is shaped by contrast, judgement, risk, timing and nerve rather than by any illusion of completeness. The event runs for about ninety minutes at Sweet@The Yellow Book on York Place, with performer places limited each month. I have done a few performances and valued the supportive atmosphere both during and after the show.
Paul Levy chatted to Chance Bliss Dini just before a Slamalogue about the aim of this unique evening of performance.
What makes Slamalogue interesting for me is that it puts acting under a slightly different pressure from an ordinary scratch night or rehearsal sharing. A performer cannot rely on the slow accumulation of atmosphere that a full scene or full play might allow. They have to arrive quickly inside the language, establish a relationship with the room, and make the monologue land pretty quickly.. That creates a particular kind of exposure. It can reveal technical skill, certainly, but it can also reveal taste, judgement and imagination. Sweet’s own description leans towards quirky and offbeat choices rather than the obvious speeches, and that gives the event a useful identity. It suggests that the night is not only about performance quality, but about the intelligence of selection.
There is also something healthy in the fact that the audience gets to vote. Audience voting can sometimes flatten nuance, but in a format like this it sharpens attention. People are not watching passively. They are comparing, remembering, discussing and deciding. That changes the atmosphere in the room. The event becomes partly theatrical presentation and partly public test. For performers, especially newer ones, that may be daunting. For audiences, it makes the evening more active and less dutiful.
Sweet Venues has long positioned itself as a year round Brighton venue with a performer led approach and fringe scale programming, so Slamalogue sits quite naturally within that ecology. It is not a grand statement about theatre. It is smaller than that and perhaps more useful. It gives actors a disciplined space to try material, it gives audiences a direct role in the shape of the night, and it reminds Brighton that theatre can still be lively without pretending to be monumental.
Chance Bliss Dini hosts Slamalogue with the kind of practical theatre intelligence the format needs. Public listings connect her both to the event and to Witwerks Theatre, and her own profile describes her as an actor, producer, director, writer, and drama and SEN teacher. That combination is useful in a night like this, where hosting is not simply a matter of introductions. It requires judgement, calm, timing and an understanding of what performers need when they are stepping into a competitive but exposed space. She gives the evening a sense of structure without making it feel stiff or over managed.
More info and booking here
