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Theatre503 presents
All I Want For Christmas
by Rex Obano, Richard Marsh, Lou Ramsden, Beth Steel, Nimer Rashed
Theatre503
8 - 12 December, 2009
A review by Alexandra Carey for EXTRA! EXTRA!
All I Want for Christmas is a selection of new short plays - around the theme of Christmas of course - by ‘The 503 Five’. These are Theatre 503’s resident new writing talent and this is their first public outing in that capacity. The plays range in length from about 10 to around 20 mins and they are certainly varied in the way they interpret ‘Christmas’ as a theme. Ranging from quietly poignant to utterly surreal, the selection keeps moving and holds the attention with plenty of laughs and stylish set ups. There were good performances all round; to pick out a few - Daniel Ings and Ed Hancock created the perfect combination of arrogance and irreverence in their Festive Bankers, the young Dylan Brewerton-Harper deserves credit for his performance of the cheeky son engineering his parents’ reunion; and Daniel Millar’s camp elf was a creation of special beauty! The most memorable moments were the most unexpected turns these tales took - Lou Ramsden’s cannibal family shocked by the arrival of a policeman as a potential son-in-law was so bizarre it was great, and Thaila Zucchi’s sexy female Santa was a brilliant comic ending to the evening. Generally the feel was comic - though it’s hard to tell if Beth Steel’s Silent Storm would have been more moving without an extremely inopportune breakage of a key prop! These five writers are clearly having fun and manage to skirt admirably around the edge of the dangerous soppiness so often associated with Christmas without resorting to jaded boxing-day-comedy-channel bitterness, and as a result it’s easy to watch and hard not to enjoy. The five plays show five writers with completely different styles condensing and personalising the very fundamentals of dramatic construction in the focused way only a short play can highlight. Despite the wacky content of some of these pieces they are all pretty conventional in form and, if you chose to note it, the evening reads like a lesson in basic dramaturgy - but this is not a criticism. Likewise none of these plays really probe any emotional depths - but this is also, not a criticism. The evening is light, festive, funny and just the right length. It’s a starting point for these writers’ in their attachment to 503 and it also feels like a refreshing starting point for all the hyperbole and mess of Christmas TV and Theatre.
Theatre 503 7.45pm Tickets: £10/8 Box Office: 02079787040/ book online at http://www.theatre503.com/
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