Bah Humbug!

A Christmas Carol - Review - Royalty Theatre

October is a little bit early for me to be getting festive, but I made an exception for a production of A Christmas Carol - it's suitably ghostly for Hallowe'en and is, after all, the original "bah humbug" tale!
The Victorian tale of redemption and the victory of charity and goodwill over greed and wealth is as relevant today as it was when Dickens wrote it. It also happens to be one of my favourite stories, loved ever since I first saw Alistair Sim's Scrooge some 40 years ago.

So would The Royalty production meet my expectations? I ventured out with my friend Irene (a Royalty virgin) to see!

A sparse set, effectively enhanced with scenes projected onto the backdrop, Christmas carols, and a brilliant narrator (Thomas Potts) ensured the audience was drawn in from the outset.
Marley's Ghost (Paul Lonsdale) had a slightly vampirish air, as he pleaded with his old friend Ebeneezer Scrooge (Billy Towers) to mend his ways, and pay heed to the spirits who were about to visit him. The Christmas Spirits were each quite distinct - from the playful and sympathetic Christmas Past (Siobhan Brennan) dressed as the fairy from the Christmas tree, to the positively Brian Blessed-ish Christmas Present (Scott Henderson) with his deep rumbling good humour (and it has to be said, the most preposterous wig), to the ominously silent and forbidding Christmas Future (Jordan Carling).
There are some good performances - most notably Thomas Potts as the narrator and James Lee as Bob Cratchit, whose carol singing as he returns from visiting Tiny Tim's grave is heartbreakingly beautiful. Billy Towers plays a convincing miserly Scrooge. Under the direction of Andrew Barella the story flows well, certainly in the first act and I think this is due in good part to the quality of the narration and smooth scene changes. The second act saw a few technical glitches, with lights coming up too soon, which meant the audience knew the ghosts hadn't appeared and disappeared quite so magically as they should, and stage crew struggled to get the set pieces in place before the scene began. The spooky mist that accompanied the ghosts was a tad over done, which unfortunately did detract from the atmosphere of Christmas Future rather than enhancing it, proving more amusing than ominous as the front two rows disappeared into the fog. A note for future productions - where dry ice is concerned, less is definitely more!
That said, this was a joyous production, and was certainly entertaining and we left with a warm, festive glow at the end of the night.

It runs until Sat 1st Nov, so if you are looking for a hallowe'en activity that's a bit different, just want to avoid the trick or treaters  or fancy an early start to your festive spirit then you could do worse than pay a visit to the Royalty this week! 

This review was published on Spikemike ...is breaking a leg

Creepy Crawlies

The past week I seem to have developed a magnetic personality for creatures with more than four legs. It began with a spider clinging to my car, looking as if it had been caught in a room with David Banner and some gamma rays. I am reliably informed this is a female green (no,really?) orb weaver spider. Quite common, actually.




 Next up, no more than two days later, this chap...who was cheeky enough to be inside the car! Yikes! Fortunately I didn't spot him until the end of the journey as I was parking the car, so no spider induced traffic calamity. This one is a harvester spider, apparently. He wasn't too keen on being ushered to the outside of the car. Perhaps for this reason he made a re-appearence a day later...crawling up my jeans leg. It may not have been the same one...perhaps he sent his big brother round to sort me out? Either way, this one was also encouraged to take a turn in the fresh air!


In the meantime at work, I have been keeping a spidery weather eye on two large black spider legs that are currently protruding out of a crack in the window frame near my desk. They have been there for a week, unmoving. Past experience has taught me not to be complacent. Just because they haven't moved doesn't mean they won't. I know one morning I will come to work and the legs will have disappeared and somwhere a rather large black spider will be lurking...

This is not the end of the creepy crawlie saga - I have also had a shield bug incident - but it was at this point that I felt inspired to pen a spidery flash...herewith shared!

Spider Humour
Spiders have a fiendish sense of humour. They lay in wait and jump out, "Boo!" Or creep up, unawares, as you watch TV in the dark. A sudden RAWR!!" in the flickering light of "Aliens III". But the best ones play the long game, hiding in a crevice in the window sill, just the tip of a black leg in view. There for days, unmoving. You convince yourself it is no threat. Then, one day, gone.

James

Written for the final exercise at the Shepherd's Dene writing workshop I attended last week.
We were given a photograph as a prompt and asked to write something about the person in the picture. The photograph I was given was of a man/woman sitting on a bench in the grounds of the house, looking out across the autumn gardens. The picture was slightly out of focus and taken from behind, so the face could not be seen, the person could have been male or female. I decided on male, and called him James.
This is my piece. Feel free to comment.

James sat, hunched, on the bench. He stared out across the gardens, but he didn't see the trees bathed in their autumn reds and golds. He saw a different scene. A different red.
To the casual observer he could just have been someone enjoying a moment of calm in a busy day, but his calm, still exterior belied the turmoil of his thoughts. Images from earlier in the day crowded in on him. He struggled to make some kind of sense of the events, to find some hint of what he should do next.
How had he gotten involved in it all? He tried to pinpoint the moment when things began to go wrong. Had he done somethingto cause it all? Was it all his fault again?
In his mind he replayed the events of the day. Minute by minute, turning this way and that, trying to see all the angles, every point of view. But he couldn't see it. However he viewed it, it all just seemed inexplicable. He couldn't see that anything he had said or done could have caused the chaos that had errupted.
This time, he was sure. It had not been his fault. This time, someone else was to blame.