The 14 students in this Central School of Speech and Drama SSD group gave us an attractive, fresh showcase which included some sparkling new, student writing alongside two very welcome Shakespeare pieces, so the range was unusually and pleasingly wide.
I also admired the original ensemble framing which included some very watchable, quasi-balletic movement and, as you’d expect from Central, the voice work was excellent throughout.
Simona Bitmate certainly provided a high spot. She had adapted Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and gave us a young, shawled Iranian woman returning to her family in Iran. It was a powerful monologue, delivered with warmth and passion and Bitmate, presumably an Iranian speaker, brought the notices and remarks in Iranian to life with well-judged timing and real conviction.
Later, in completely different mood, Bitmate showed admirable versatility in creating a naive, vulnerable young girl being dumped by a young man (Meilir Rhys Williams) who she thought was now her boyfriend. She has a very mobile face which she uses to fine effect and she and Rhys Williams brought out all the poignancy in Stealing Sweets and Punching People by Phil Porter.
The audience was entranced and entertained by Lauren Kellegher, who entered from the back as a party-goer in absurd fancy dress as Batman’s Robin, the piece written by another member of the group, Sophie Wyburn. She was very funny with her intelligently timed delivery and brought out the sadness of her situation as well as the humour.
Kellegher was also strong in Country Music by Simon Stephens. She and Sam Clark played a very jittery couple who have run away. It eventually transpires - and her facial expressions told the story almost without need for words - that Clark’s character has knifed someone, but he is in tragic-comical denial of the enormity of this as he tries obsessively to persuade her to choose a packet of crisps from the huge box he is gauchely carrying. Clark is good to watch and his account of Edmund’s ‘bastardy’ soliloquy from King Lear showed that he also has a nicely articulated ability with verse speaking. At the same time, his Edmund, suited and charismatic, was dramatically convincing.
Maisie Turpie gave us a very compelling few minutes as a West Midlands cleaner finding a suicide (not for the first time) in one of ‘her’ lavatories in Laura Wade’s Breathing Corpses. She evoked a wide range of emotions and has a good line in wide-eyed realism sitting alongside quite touching emotional depth. Her contrasting role was as one of Noel Coward’s cloche-hatted, upper middle class stereotypes in a piece, with Kellegher in yet another example of versatility, from Fallen Angels. The tension between the two women was well caught and I loved the voices.
Frank Osborne has boyish, wholesome good looks. His extract from Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song revolved round a game of Scrabble with Lauren Little, who has a deliciously expressive face and brought passion, warmth and vibrancy to her role (as she later did in a speech from Two Noble Kinsmen). Together they developed comic rhythm well, although Osborne seemed a touch hammy to begin with.
He was much better in the duologue he wrote and performed with Pippa Wildwood. The two have agreed to fight - but only with increasingly restrictive rules and, although she outwits him and wins, Osborne’s character shows his opponent real sympathy. As the dupe, Osborne showed real acting skill.
Fernando Gordon has enjoyable stage presence, first as a less than subtle young man trying it on with a pretty girl on a beach in Jamaica (from Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummies) and later as an awkward IT specialist let go from a city office but desperately wanting to establish and maintain contact with Ashleigh Cheadle - who wants none of it - in a piece from One Million Tiny Plays about Britain by Craig Taylor.
Cheadle - who has those castable classic looks ideally made for costume drama or Ibsen - gets exactly the right sense of a character trying to be polite but determined not to be trapped as she backs away from Gordon’s earnestness. She gave a pleasing performance in an impassioned monologue from Mark Haddon’s Polar Bears too.
Jack Parker is another one to watch. He produced a delightful geek who comes to mend Wyburn’s computer in Laura Wade’s Other Hands and later a cruel, angry man backing away from a relationship which he realises won’t produce money after all in Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie.
Two other vignettes which no one who saw this showcase will forget are Meghan Treadway’s hilarious rendering of Steven Berkoff’s Decadence in which she played a huntress reaching orgasm on horseback and Wyburn’s intimate monologue, delivered perched on the front of the stage, about a fatal illness. She’d written it herself and, with her fine acting, it really came movingly to life.
When students write some of their own material as, by definition, they do on this course, and they do it to such a high standard, it really does add an edge when it comes to assembling a showcase. I genuinely enjoyed myself and laughed more than I have at a showcase for some time.
Expert choice:
David Padbury, agent: Lauren Kellegher, Frank Osborne
Christopher Ager, agent: Ashleigh Cheadle, Sam Clark
Fortune, London, April 19
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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