Tuesday
and Wednesday, December 2 and 3, 2008PAST PRODUCTIONS
Wednesday, 29th October, 2008 : Our first event! Open Mic evening. A successful night which seemed to be enjoyed by all. Martin Drury produced a one man short play which was well received and helped the evening along while we also had songs and poems, a Victoria Wood sketch and a discussion about three projects for next year. General consensus was that stand up acting is OK and so it will become a regular feature. Thanks to all those who came, tell your friends and bring more to perform next time.
Tuesday
and Wednesday, December 2 and 3, 2008
Our first production. Contractions starring starring Natasha James and Bronagh Lagan (pictured) went well and was a good choice for our first production and seemed to be enjoyed by the audience on both nights.
The play by Mike Bartlett was a satirical look at the control corporations attempt to exert over the lives of their employees.
KENNEDY'S CHILDREN
by robert patrick
Paradigm Shift, a Birmingham based theatre company, opened their production of Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children.
The 1974 play, by Robert Patrick was nominated for four Tony awards with Shirley Knight winning best supporting actress and it also won an OBIE (off Broadway awards) for best new American play.
The play is set in 1974 in a Lower East Side bar in New York on a miserable day. Five strangers come in to shelter and each has a tale to tell. Unusually the five, along with the barman, do now interact with each other, but talk to the audience in a series of monologues.
They were all children of the brief Golden age when Kennedy was President and ruled Camelot with dreams of a future when anything was possible – now a decade on the dreams are as far away as ever.
We have a gay actor who yearns for the alternative theatre of the 60s when he felt he had a purpose. There is a Vietnam veteran trying to make some meaning of the war and a would-be new Marilyn Monroe in a world where the era of the screen sex goddess was drawing to a close.
There is a teacher who is obsessed by JFK and his assassination which still dominate her thoughts while finally there is the 60s hippie, an activist who still has her dreams but has grown up enough to realise dreams and reality do not happily mix, all watched over by a bartender who also had his ambitions.
The play opened upstairs at The Station on Tuesday, June 16 at 8pm with a second performance at a special Father’s Day time of 6pm on Sunday, June 21.
The cast of Kennedy’s Children was:
A founder member of Paradigm Shift, Mark Tracey has previously appeared in productions of The Assassin, Huis Clos, Henry V and Romeo & Juliet. A keen author, he is currently developing a number of film and television projects for future production.
Charlie Reilly has recently appeared in productions with Stage2 Youth Theatre, including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Spoonface Steinberg. She is currently studying for AS Levels at KEHS and for a LAMDA bronze medal award for Acting.
Samuel Morgan has played characters including Willie from Blue Remembered Hills, Khashoggi from We Will Rock You the musical, Trevor Graydon from Thoroughly Modern Millie, Jack from Edward Bond's The Under Room, and Jack the Ripper in a devised piece "Child's Play".
Alba Allan Torriset is currently in her first year studying Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. She studied Drama, Music and English at Sussex Downs College in East Sussex, and hopes to pursue a career within the Arts.
Holly Turton has appeared in various Stage2, MDCC and other company's productions around Birmingham, and directed two summer tours for MDCC. She is also a founding member of Paradigm Shift.
Charles Harry has acted and directed with MDCC since the early 1990s. Previous directing credits are The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed, No Way Out and Les Mains Sales and Tartuffe. He hopes to direct Measure for Measure next year.
Holly and Charles are co-directors and are also members of MDCC, the company responsible for open air Shakespeare around the Midlands during the summer.
SMILE
Smile was a free
show to mark our first season as a pub theatre and stars Louise Stokes
and Christian Clarke.
Louise (right) is making a name for herself with a growing band of comedy characters. She will be bringing along the morose Welsh singer-songwriter Nicola Goff the Goth and Queen of the Kingstanding Chavs, street poet and urban philosopher Kimmy Sue Anne.
Louise is in the finals of a national internet comedy competition on 1click2fame and you can see her and vote for her on http://www.1click2fame.com/performances/1158.
She
is also in the semi-finals of So You Think You're Funny? hoping to make
it to the finals in Edinburgh later in summer.
Christian Clarke, (left) a former pupil of Bishsop Vesey's was narrowly pipped in the 2004 Edinburgh finals of SYTYF, widely seen as the leading competition for new acts with previous winners including Dylan Moran, Peter Kaye and Lee Mack.
He will be giving his views on life in general.
Also in the show will be some readings by local poets, as well a some extra comedy characters and a few surprises.
Remember this is a free show and starts at 8pm upstairs at The Station.
REVIEW
PROBLEM SOLVING
SURVIVAL - an autobiography
Wednesday, 16 September 8pm
Upstairs at The Station Pub, Station Street, Sutton Coldfield
THE world is full of leaders and followers but somewhere in the mix there are those in positions of authority who find bullying an easier and perhaps more satisfying option than leading.
Bullying in the workplace is a more common than many realise and the play, written by Louise Stokes, (pictured) examines the effects.
Rachel Green plays the manager who boats of destroying lives in her last job and threatens to do the same here. Stokes, as Karen, finds that there is no escape and the bullying goes on and on and on like a dripping tap.
Rachel's outbursts and repetitive mantras of” there is no escape”, “I am only doing my job” and the rest serve to build the idea that bullying becomes a relentless, cumulative assault on staff.
The play is based on Stokes' own experience when she worked in mental health in the NHS and was a disturbing piece which succeeded in making people in the audience uncomfortable.
Problem Solving was a lighter piece with Stokes playing both Cathy who is considering therapy and her therapist.
Cathy has a penchant for self harm, razor blades being a favourite, replacing one pain with another, but is finding more satisfaction, what little there is, in letting others harm her in a series of one night stands.
Her therapist meanwhile is just as unstable as everyone else, battling decisions of what to eat that night, what to watch on TV and even considering developing some sort of psychosis or trauma to giver her better perspective.
Eventually Cathy weighs the options and decides the money she saves by shunning therapy might well be better spent on razor blades as she seeks answers to things that were never really there in the first place.
It is a bittersweet monologue of two characters which had enough laughs to amuse but enough pathos to provoke.
A good start to the new season with both Rachel and Louise looking to return with some lighter, comedy pieces in the near future.