There is no catch, we really are offering free – yes, FREE – tickets to AYT readers aged 16 to 25 for selected plays from Write Now 4, the new writing festival at the Jack Studio Theatre. The theatre asked writers with a connection to south east London to submit previously unperformed plays and from the 90 submissions, three plays were picked to be a part of the festival. See below for a bit more information about the shows on offer and then scroll down to see how to claim your free tickets.

Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Lewisham Council and Sponsored by Acorn Estates Ltd
Jack Studio Theatre presents its Annual Playwrighting Festival
WRITE NOW 4 
4 May – 25 May 2013
Jack Studio Theatre, London
brockleyjack.co.uk
@brocjacktheatre

The Magic Hour by Martin McNamara
Dennis O’Neill has died, and his family gather at the hospital as the priest prays for his soul. Whilst two sons try to remember how to mourn the dead, an older generation evokes the remorse and sense of loss of unwilling migrants from an indifferent Ireland. The Magic Hour is a darkly comic family drama set in a waiting room of a London hospital in the 1990s.

Staged Reading | Wednesday 8 May at 8pm & Saturday 11 May at 8pm

No Rhyme by Melanie Pennant
Nushka’s planning revenge, Pepper’s plans backfire and Jayde is nowhere to be seen. Katya hates her job, Lizzie can’t leave hers and a young girl hovers between life and death.

Enter a world where a disrespect can mean more than a life, where being different makes you the target. No Rhyme is a raw new play about youth on youth crime and the struggle to find answers. It’s New Year’s Eve. When tragedy strikes who will walk away?

Fully staged production | Tuesday 14 – Saturday 25 May at 8pm

Please note that free tickets are only available for the shows and dates listed above and are subject to availability. For full festival listings, please visit brockleyjack.co.uk

How to claim your free tickets
Simply e-mail producer@brockleyjack.co.uk (limited to 2 per person) by the 18 May with your name, age, the play title that you would like to see and performance date. Your tickets will then be ready for you to collect at the box office on the night!

Since it began in 2010, BE Festival (Birmingham European Festival) has flourished, now bringing an abundance of European theatre and performance to the city of Birmingham. This year, the festival is on the road, with Best of BE Festival taking three highlights from this year’s festival on a country-wide tour. For a festival in its infancy, this step is a big one: to take work developed in a festival context to cities that do not have a relationship with such work or the festival itself is risky. Thankfully, this pays off – audiences are treated to three pieces that show the artistic and creative merits of European work. It’s a joy to see these European companies, some of which are still relatively new, offering their performances in intimate fringe spaces. There’s a lot to be said for the artistic vision of spaces such as the Barbican, which regularly show international work on vast stages, but in the small black studio space of Rich Mix in Shoreditch, the excitement of seeing emerging European artists is palpable.

Three companies and three different styles are presented in Best of BE Festival: the small and delicate L’Absent by La Compagnie du Geste qui Sauve, the artistically bizarre Vladimir Tzekov with Fantasy No10; ‘The Beauty of Life’ and the startlingly brilliant debut of A Tres Bandes with Solfatara. In the latter, a predominantly text-based piece, the playful interpretation through surtitles and translation shows us that text can take on a life of its own, regardless of the languages spoken and understood. Each piece lasts roughly half an hour, offering a snapshot of the work being made in cities beyond our borders.

L’Absent offers a poignant look at the absence of a loved one departing, and leaving behind memories and objects associated with them. Two principal performers are accompanied by subtle vocal melodies offered by a third. The male performer embodies the furniture and objects once associated with him. The female performer interacts with them but it is clear that she only sees the inanimate objects, without feeling or seeing her boyfriend/husband/lover manipulating them. It’s a playful, poignant and subtle performance, particularly in moments such as the male performer becoming the woman’s dress, floating and swishing around her. The closeness and desire for contact is electrified, but never realised, for he is ultimately a fading memory that time is washing away. L’Absent doesn’t bring tears, but it certainly warms the heart.

In Vladimir Tzekov’s Fantasy Nº10; ‘The Beauty of Life’, the tenth piece in a series of performances looking into the relationship between dramatic form and music, this emerging company offers a piece dictated by image and music, with philosophical text overlaid. It’s a difficult piece to consume, presenting images that are rich and bold: a man in a tutu, weeping as he holds ballet shoes, the slow grind and moaning of a woman as she ‘makes love’ to a philosopher, and a man in a wheelchair repeatedly thrown to the floor. “Take me out of here, bitch” he says, over and over, whilst a song builds to a crescendo, “Forever we’ll be together, beyond the grave”. Images of the performance linger long after, but their meaning is often elusive. In a post-show discussion, it became clear that this confusion, the inability to define and describe the piece, is what the company strives for from their audience. In effect, then, it has worked – from the company’s point of view, at least. Above all, a strikingly bold piece.

But it is Solfatara by A Tres Bandes that steals Best of BE Festival. It is unsurprising that the piece won 1st Prize and Audience Prize at BE Festival, given its hilarity, conviction and inventiveness. Using the varying stages of a volcano to describe a couple’s relationship, this piece is astonishingly well developed. Creating a physical presence for ‘the fear’ in which we all feel during a relationship and our lives, the couple trip and fall down what feels like an endless set of stairs that will ultimately lead to the destruction of their relationship. Text collides between them, and a third performer embodying ‘the fear’, coaxing them to say what they really feel, offers a comical angle to the work. The text loops and builds until even the surtitles give up, and bemoan the company’s need to speak so quickly and tediously. Solfatara is a joy, and highlights the need for a festival such as BE Festival to give space to such European talent.

Best of BE Festival offers a night of European creativity that won’t leave its audience disappointed. From the loveable to the quirky and downright hilarious, be sure to catch the triple bill on its journey through the UK.

Best of BE Festival is on tour until 6 November. For more information, tour dates, and venues see the BE Festival website.

There’s no doubt that London is a multicultural city. Walking its network of interconnected streets you’re hit with a myriad of scents, the essence of culinary pickings from around the globe mingling to create the substance of this great capital. The London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) celebrates this multiculturalism by opening up London to world wide theatrical experiences; nations, cultures and theatre-making practices collide in a festival that proves the slipperiness of the term ‘border’ and probes at our cultural heritage.

LIFT presents a programme of work from New York, Belarus, Iran, Romania, Tunisia, Germany, Australia, the UK… the list goes on. It offers work that pushes boundaries both geographically and theatrically, and that celebrates the power of theatre and the joys of being culturally curious. Whilst bringing the world to London, however, it is also a festival that stands out – in the words of Artistic Director Mark Ball – for being about “London for Londoners”.

There are three factors that influence programming decisions and one of these is including work that is site specific, using London as a stage in such a way as to make the city be seen differently. Requardt & Rosenberg’s spectacular Motor Show takes place in “an acre of forgotten land” by the North Greenwich landmark that is the O2 Arena. Iran based Hamid Pourazari’s Unfinished Dream uses a car park in Croydon as its stage, and Look Left Look Right use the hidden alleyways of Camden for their one-on-one performance of You Once Said Yes. In just these three examples the diversity of the festival is highly evident; a motoring/dance theatre spectacular, a promenade performance telling the stories of local refugees and an intimate adventure through the streets of Camden.

Taking routes trodden everyday, locations seen routinely and transforming the way they are seen – and even used – takes audience members out of themselves and their habitual ways of seeing. London is shown in a new light, forcing audiences to consider the makeup of their home city and this notion is played with in extremes in Germany’s Rimini Protokoll’s 100% London. Cast from 100 everyday Londoners selected based on specific criteria drawn from demographic data the production pits views from ‘experts in daily life’ against this 1% of London’s population. The result is a questioning of official reality and an exploration of the human truth behind this city.

Truth plays a vital role in a lot of the work on offer at LIFT, particularly that selected based on the factor of being from parts of the world where changes are happening. Belarus Free Theatre are an excellent example coming from a place where “theatre is vital to their existence”, not because it’s celebrated and enjoyed but because it is an absolutely necessary means through which to vocalise certain truths. Belarus Free Theatre are banned in their own country, they suffer death threats, perform in secret and still carry on because they believe – as does Ball – that “theatre can be a catalyst to inform and change public opinion”.

In such work can be seen a stronger political side to LIFT, bringing work from countries where the theatre is imbued with “bite and urgency” and reminding us that we often “forget our privileged position”. Such urgent work as Belarus Free Theatre’s Minsk 2011 with such vital messages to utter can lead to a questioning of the work made here in our privileged country. But LIFT also presents work from emerging, and leading, UK based experimental theatre-makers such as Forced Entertainment and dreamthinkspeak. In programming the two together Ball aims to show there are “intrinsic links” between breaking theatrical and geographical boundaries.

Interestingly LIFT features a number of Shakespearian productions, alongside dreamthinkspeak’s The Rest is Silence there’s an Iraqi Romeo and Juliet and a Tunisian take on Macbeth entitled Macbeth: Leila and Ben. Discussing this latter production and such use of Shakespeare Ball simple remarks how “the man was a genius”; his work is universal and it does relate to contemporary life and problems. Macbeth: Leila and Ben presents a “direct comparison between Macbeth and the Arabic dictator”, it creatively blends Shakespeare with verbatim interviews using this pinnacle of British theatre to understand the unstable world around them. Using Shakespeare in this way not only gives these individuals a theatrical voice through which to speak, but revitalises traditional British theatre.

In complete contrast to this is Romanian documentary piece 20/20 telling a “historically specific story which barely got any attention” at the time of it happening. The story is that of the ethnic conflict on the Hungary-Romania border in the 1990s. Ball feels it is relevant now due to the enormous changes currently happening in Europe, and the way this story tells us how it “doesn’t take much for things to go horribly wrong”.

LIFT may present a diverse range of productions but all of them have the common element of commenting upon- altering – the world in which we live. Be that our own personal worlds or a larger society. The programme embraces spectacle, theatre as a means for political expression and theatre as storytelling to be enjoyed. Definitions of theatre’s purpose that many of us struggle to choose between, but perhaps that is within the remit of festival to celebrate. When asked what feeling he wants the festival to exude, what experience he wants its audiences to have Ball proclaims the “wild energy” driving this “intense four week period where you can really immerse yourself in the experiences of people from around the world”. He cites intense excitement, a feeling of everything being magnified and of fun.

Presenting theatre in a myriad of forms LIFT demonstrates the immense possibility of theatre and a new truth behind “all the world’s a stage”. It’s a festival one can only see growing and taking over the city of London.

The festival continues until 15th July. For more information and details about shows, visit www.liftfestival.com.

Image credit: Gatz by Elevator Repair Service

“A good story needs a clear beginning. It needs something strong, something dynamic to get the ball rolling.” Such are the opening lines of Forced Entertainment’s newest journey into the inexplicable, The Coming Storm. These words are delivered by one performer with neither emotion nor a sense of the irony they entail. It is only once another character chooses to snatch the microphone away that this stunted introduction gives way to a rolling, democratic series of bizarre and unbelievable anecdotes, told in turn by each of the six performers.

The Coming Storm places more emphasis on narrative than some of the company’s previous shows, such as last year’s dance-heavy The Thrill Of It All, but the strands of stories are infinitely fragmented and deliciously bamboozling. This is not a theatre of structured scenes and happy endings. A dull man drawls about falling in love with a foreign girl on a European coach trip; a woman plays through the same phone call again and again, each time changing the location, tone or respondent; a crocodile costume is dragged casually across the stage and then forgotten for another half an hour. The overall meaning of events is unclear but the atmosphere is one of impending doom as characters’ pasts and futures weave in and out of one another like a beautiful yet abstract tapestry.

Music plays a huge role in this textural, experiential brand of theatre. Whether it is a repeating drum beat or a dissonant chord on the upright piano around which much of the action centres, music punctuates, illustrates and complements the multiple narratives of The Coming Storm. It is not played with finesse or flair (indeed most of the company were previously unable to play an instrument) but with steady atmospheric determination and a strange, shy kind of soulfulness. What really makes the show exceptional, however, is the way in which its company’s performers bounce off one another, often to hilarious comic effect and sometimes with stark isolation. One performer interjects that she has forgotten to do her ‘dance,’ at which point she proceeds to cover herself in a thin sheet and move around the stage like an infantile ghost in slow motion. Performers fight for attention like children dancing in and out of the spotlight, one man makes half-hearted attempts to commit suicide by hanging a noose from a clothing rail no taller than himself.

The Coming Storm is sad, funny and beautifully hypnotic throughout. Perhaps its two uninterrupted hours of engaging nonsense drag a little at points, but the company is nothing if not challenging towards its audiences and the final moments, including a revelation with the ominous crocodile costume and the show’s final haunting piano chords, make every minute worthwhile. Forced Entertainment is certainly not for everybody, least of all those who like their theatre to answer its own questions (one spectator even left the auditorium muttering “well I’m sure they entertained themselves!”). For those who take pleasure in the surreal, however, The Coming Storm is a darkly devised moment of wonderment.

The Coming Storm was at Battersea Arts Centre as part of LIFT, which continues until 15 July. For more information on the festival’s events, visit the website here.