The Stage / Shenton's View / The play(wright)'s the thing....

I’m sure you don’t mean to write off all of the Mime Festival, or all group-devised works, but your piece does sound a little like that.

Admittedly, on the one hand I know what you mean. I saw Compangnie Philippe Genty last night and it was a big disappointment — a sequence of very impressive images but with little narrative or emotion to hold it together into something I could feel involved with. Like a dance piece with the dance removed.

I also saw Faulty Optic’s production at the ICA, part of which was quite entertaining puppet work, but some of it was a slow meander with a video camera around a large set they’d built, the images projected on a screen. Not the most involving experience I’ve had.

On the other hand Inspector Sands and Stamping Ground Theatre’s ‘Hysteria’ was wonderful — funny and involving. A devised work, but given that it involved a fair bit of spoken text it’s perhaps pushing the limits of what could be counted as mime.

I guess I’m saying that seeming to write so much theatre off because of one show is a bit mean. As with mime or devised works, the number of disappointing scripted plays I’ve attended greatly outnumber the excellent productions, but I still keep going back in hope.

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Friday 24 October 2008, 6:11pm

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24 Oct 2008 at Twitter

  • 9:01pm: Finally getting round to watching 'Arrested Development'. Very, very good.
  • 5:23pm: Half-way through revisiting every comment I've made on other websites since July 2004 (280 of them).
  • 1:46pm: Quite annoyed at self for vague reasons.