Shropshire Events and Whats On Guide

Shropshire Events and Whats On Guide

Theatre Review : Owen Lewis Portable Theatre Company

Chris Eldon Lee reviews ‘The Human Rocket’ and ‘The Fight Game’ presented by the Owen Lewis Portable Theatre Company who tour to Ludlow, Welshpool, Shrewsbury and Oswestry in September 2014

I do applaud what the members of the Owen Lewis Portable Theatre are trying to do…. presenting original writing to far flung audiences. But I’m also frustrated by their failure to fully embrace the audiences that turn up to see them.

Owen Lewis has assembled some really high-class community actors. He dreams up  interesting, unexpected scenarios and writes cracking parts for them to work with.

But when you do your sums at the end of these two one-act plays…they don’t add up.

The excellent, well-crafted, individual performances are ultimately mal-treated; tossed like a series of random pebbles into a deep lake. Their ripples occasionally collide on the surface, but there’s no lasting pattern. I fear this lack of ‘audience care’ left the willing souls at the Church Stretton Festival at something of a loss; wrong footed at the outset by the decision to present the two plays in reverse order without written warning…and denied a guiding hand along the way.

I’ve reviewed “The Human Rocket” before and it’s grown on me. It features five   well-drawn, unrelated characters, each monologue-ing their individual life paths until they all end up in the same pub.

Ruth Cowell shines as a single, ‘chav’ mother with man trouble. She has a nice naturalistic, superior soap style of acting as she runs through the ups and downs of her love life. Paul Saunders is equally excellent as the matter of fact pick-pocket Percy, entertaining us with his analysis of why a life of crime is such hard work he wouldn’t recommend it. Then there’s a jilted John character leaving endless lovelorn messages on the wrong phone and an out of work actor mugging up on a Shakespearian soliloquy for a crisp advert audition. When they get to the pub, they rub up rather roughly against a cheeky-chappie, Harry Enfield-ish character. David Wright is genuinely funny with his irritatingly entertaining portrayal of a man so relentlessly cheerful you could clamber up on stage and strangle him.

There are a number of jolly good laughs in this play and the characters are great. But the production lacked dynamism and cohesion and deserved snappier direction.

After the interval, Lee Agnew stole the evening with his powerfully convincing portrayal of a washed up welterweight fighter who attacks not just his opponent, but also his manager, promoter and girl friend. The storyline’s irrational leaps and bounds inflict quite a bit of pain on the audience too. There is some eventual clarity in the denouement, and the company could consider bringing elements of the ‘twist’ to the top of the play, just to give us a fighting chance. At present it’s rather like trying to follow an obtuse who-dun-it, only to find the murderer hasn’t been previously mentioned.

A short-lived ‘art-house’ style of writing emerged in the 60s in which authors challenged theatrical norms, often at the expense of comprehension. It didn’t last because audiences don’t like being baffled. Having nurtured some highly competent actors and come up with some original and intriguing storyboards, the company would do well to also consider its work from the back of the stalls.