” . . . Like the Emperor’s New Clothes, Pavel’s play is, on the surface, see-through simple. Apples are picked and attempts are made to put them in crates for an hour. That we come out debating references to the disaster of nearby Chernobyl, the tightening influence of Russian power, and the destruction of an agricultural idyll, is testament to the way this Russian ‘New Drama’ can by suggestion alone make us work harder as an audience, and at the same time avoids dumping its writers in jail or worse.”

” . . .The Paper Birds have recognised two big truths: firstly that debt is the vehicle by which financial establishments create new money. And secondly that we are all slavishly engaged in the perpetration of this act, but that some are paying a higher price than others. . . Close to the Ustinov you can hear the sound of tennis balls ‘pocking’ away in brightly lit and heated all-year membership-only courts. . . Less than 500 metres away the Bath Food Bank operates out of the Manvers Street Baptist Church. The Paper Birds are right to tap into this dichotomy.”

“. . . Smith uses the play to make wider points. “There is a lot of dementia about,” he says, “We are forgetting to care for one another in an everyday common sense sort of way.” Delivered by the man who no longer recognises his own family, this makes for powerful health politicking. . . Smith’s convincing narrative makes us weep, sometimes ironically laugh at this uncomfortable yet for many inevitable seventh stage in the life of man. By putting the condition centre stage we are all helped to look at it in the teeth.”

A one-man show has obvious challenges, but equally offers a world of possibilities. Unconfined by a rigid or specific set our imaginations, at the merest prompting can take us anywhere the dramatist would care to lead. In the first half of the show director and dramatist, Gareth Armstrong, has his Oscar in black Victorian morning suit on a black stage against a black background and there we stay.

“In Ionesco’s list of the realities of life, death looms large. In Exit the King, which is like a panto for grown ups, set in a kind of crumbling Ruritania, designed by Anna Fleischle, we find king Berenger in the last hour and a half of his life. The play stands outside conventional time and space (indeed surreal) so aiming at (we might suppose) a universality of context. . . The play continues the season of high quality international theatre which is becoming the hallmark of the Ustinov under Laurence Boswell.”