Three cheers for the Alma – another thought-provoking play performed with great intensity to an appreciative audience, who despite prolonged applause couldn’t entice actors Lucy Ross-Elliott (Esme) and Angus Harrison (Willard) back out for a second bow at tonight’s performance of Orca. . . Orca is much more than an ocean-going mammal on wheels – it’s well worth experiencing this well-acted black comedy drama, tankside at the Alma.
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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.
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“The directors have learned that fundamental lesson of theatre (known indeed by striptease artists) that to suggest is often more powerful than to show. Morris’s other revival, Swallows and Amazons, bears this out. He has become a master of imaginative stagecraft and like Orson Welles, who brought Moby Dick to the London stage some half century ago, he relishes making the seemingly impossible possible. Total war calls for total theatre and in this production the two are well matched. “
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“Almost Heaven was powerful stuff created by Bill Buffery and Gill Nathanson which explored relationships and how we communicate within them and even the value and efficacy of language itself. This was good, authoritative, thought provoking theatre with two beautifully measured and sensitive performances which would have graced any stage and for which I can only offer the highest praise. . . a little gem of a play skilfully performed by its creators.”
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This happy marriage of circus and theatre delivers on all fronts with little nuggets like the woman who was prevented from suicide by the parachuting effect of her crinolines showing something of the potential of this kind of collaboration the unexplored terrain of which lies before us like a gaping chasm. The play is a fitting tribute to and triumphant celebration of ‘The ornament of Bristol and wonder of the age’. Bristolians will love it as will anyone with the vaguest interest in one universally recognized as amongst the greatest of Britons.
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“The ultimate parable of racial intolerance, bigotry and injustice, in 2006 British librarians ranked Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird ahead of the Bible as one “every adult should read before they die”. It was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 starring Gregory Peck and Christopher Sergel’s stage adaptation has been performed all over the world and in Monroeville, Alabama, the setting for the novel, every year since 1990. . . The full house in the Theatre Royal saved its biggest cheer for the children who starred in tonight’s show presented by the Regent’s Park Open Air Company. . .”
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