London Season aka ‘Mystery Shows’

As seems to have become the pattern of my last few posts, I find myself posting this on Monday, rather than Sunday. Apologies dear readers if you wait patient on a Sunday evening for that week’s post (however, I doubt anyone actually does this).

From the point of view of college, this week has focused around projects. This week marked the end of my six week lecture block (yay), before I returned to shows after Easter. As a result, this week included lighting, sound and props presentation, which I have been working on for the last six weeks; all of which seemed to go fine.

Asides from the excitement of projects, I spent most of my evenings in college watching the London Season shows. This time ever year, college takes four new studio plays to the Gate in London for a week. However, before this, they perform the shows in Cardiff for a week, having painstakingly recreated the venues in college (they even put the annoyingly placed pillars in!). The beauty of this, and what I really enjoyed about the plays, is that each is a new writing which has never been performed before, thus I went to the shows each night knowing only the title and the casting, nothing more. It made for a wonderfully refreshing way to see theatre, as I had no preconceived ideas about what to expect.

The first of the four plays was ‘All that I Am’ which followed a group of friends coming together following the death of a mutual friend and the tensions between them as they deal with the loss of their friend. Wednesday’s play was ‘Conspiracy’, which followed a group of student protesters and activists against fracking in Wales. Whilst I saw ‘Blue’ on Thursday which was set in a mental health unit, but followed the staff that worked there, as a new member, Anna joins. The final show that I saw was ‘Ten Weeks’ which is set around a ten week Christianity course, looking at the individual journey’s and issues of each character’s life and faith. All four plays were brilliant, and very different to each other. I would urge anyone to see them if you are in London this coming week; possibly the best plays I’ve seen in college so far (bar ‘Narrative’ obviously).

As well as the London season I saw ‘Anything Can Happen’, a musical review put on by the musical theatre students, in the Sherman. Having not seen any of the musical theatre students perform before I didn’t know what to expect, but thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was also nice to see a different space within the Sherman, as the musical review was in the studio.

As I’m sure you may have guessed dear reader, Saturday saw me wandering off to Barking and Chiswick for the day. After a slightly problematic start to the day, I made it to Barking, to meet actors from both the classic and modern series, including Michael Leader (who has also played the milkman in EastEnders for the last 30 years, as well as being the infamous Stormtrooper who hits his head on the door in Star Wars). From Barking, I dashed across London to Chiswick for this month’s Fantom signing, with their usual great selection of guests. As there was quite a gap between signing session at Chiswick, Andrew and I went to a nearby café which was really lovely, as we were able to have a proper catch-up.

Following my busy day in London on Saturday, I travelled home on Sunday to Manchester. Dad came to pick me up (I always seem to have an awful lot to take home), but we stopped off at Eddie’s Diner in the bay and the Experience, as they have just added a lot of new props and costumes from series nine. It was great to see some new things in the experience, having been I think four times whilst all the series eight props had been there. After a good wander round the experience and the shop, we headed home to. Quite what I shall be doing for the next three weeks remains a mystery.

One of the new additions to the experience (Dad's picture not mine)