Tom Wells is the owner of that most treasured of attributes for a playwright, the gift of metaphor. Broken Biscuits is set in the garden shed (carefully envisioned in Lily Arnold’s evocative set) of Megan who is the new owner of a second hand drum set and plans to mould her friends, Holly and Ben into a group in the unrealistic timescale of eight weeks so as to enter a ’battle of the bands’ competition.
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Bravely, as it must have been in 1955, the play unravels some of the prejudices and preconceptions that bedevilled race relations in 50s America. Like many a notable work it plays out society’s tensions in the (unfulfilled) life of an individual. Yet this is no blunt instrument to bash society’s sensibilities. The play works as a piece of theatre and not mere polemic by observing and playing on a web of sensitivities
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As we awake to a new American president we can take a crumb of comfort by reflecting that however bad things may seem at the present it was by any measure worse at some stage in the past (take your pick). Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series of books and subsequent stage productions take as their starting point the fact that things were, once upon a real time, pretty grim for all concerned.
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This is refined writing that elevates prose to its full height and where the play as a whole, is a kind of poetry. This is theatre, not quite as stark as say, Godot, but reduced nonetheless to its essential elements of storytelling in a darkened room. In a way the star of the show is the craic, where language is played like an instrument of infinite notes. On the face of it The Weir is a mere collection of oft-repeated ghost stories, but the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
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This show falls in a tradition of emotionally powerful, thematically northern based, working-class stories that deliver more than they seem to offer. A little lad struggles to overcome the deep-seated prejudices of his coal mining community to get himself accepted as a dancer . . . everything a good musical should be: it has something to say and does it whilst moving us with the human struggle to be oneself against all the odds.
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