We both thought this play/production was really excellent. The Bush Studio is one of our trusted venues these days – we rarely leave that place disappointed. This time we felt we had seen a very original piece of writing and some excellent performances.
The scenario is a simple one. A housing association block acquires a stench in the building which residents suspect might be caused by the demise of one no-longer-visible resident. But the residents seem powerless to get action out of the bureaucratic jobsworths “from the housing”.
The play is performed in a narrative rather than dramatic style, although the narrator/performers do slip in and out of characters – several each – while telling the story. A style that sounds iffy when described but it really worked for this piece. Below is the teaser/trailer fort his production.
The story is sad at many levels, yet there is a great deal of humour and humanity in the play. Performers Marcia Lecky, Safiyya Ingar & Sam Baker Jones all do a great job of bringing the story to life. Jess Barton directed the piece with a simple but very effective style.
The piece speaks volumes about the our society in the 2020s by telling a simple story, not by preaching or screeching about the issues that underlie that story. Farah Najib has written a really excellent short play here – we’ll be looking out for more of her work – that’s for sure.
Janie and I love the Bush Theatre and we love the Bush Studio.
Sometimes love puts people through trials and ordeals. On a horribly wet, blowy night, Janie and I wondered whether we love the Bush THAT much when we set off to see this show.
No pressure, but it had better be good…
…said a windswept me to the faintly-amused-rather-than-horrified young woman who sold me the play text.
We needn’t have worried. The Bush Studio has, once again, found and produced a truly excellent piece of small-scale theatre.
Light on plot and heavy on coincidence, the play explores the love trials and ordeals of two young women who fall for each other but who both, in different ways, working their way out of relationships with men. The piece is laced with symbolism and surrealism, at times reminiscent of Lorca, at other times reminiscent of Greek tragedy. We both liked its weirdness.
The play is performed as a two-hander by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi and Annabel Baldwin. We had seen Nadi Kemp-Sayfi before – in A Museum In Baghdad. Both are excellent actresses. The strength of the theatrical experience is surely down to those two and the director, Emily Aboud, who surely got the most out of their undoubted talents.
We saw the last preview. The audience was a little sparse, but perhaps that was a preview thing; a stormy Saturday before Monday’s Press Night. The audience was mostly people who were a lot younger than us; makes a change to go to places where we bring the average age up considerably.
We left the theatre feeling thoroughly exhilarated and genuinely glad that we weathered the storms to see that production. Having foreshadowed the tempestuousness of the relationships on show in the play, the weather then pandered to us as we left The Bush, keeping the wind and piss to a minimum for our journey home, before letting rip again soon after we got home.
It looks as though some tickets, especially for later in the run, are still available, whereas some nights are sold out or down to the last few. We’d thoroughly recommend this play/production, so if you fancy it, book early to avoid disappointment. Runs until 21 December 2024.
Our first visit to the theatre of 2024 and it was worth the wait.
Set in an NHS mental health service unit for juveniles, the play tells the simple story of a youngster who enters the workplace imagining that he might make a difference in a hurry.
Then reality bites.
The play is beautifully written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner, and very well directed by Ed Madden, who should, if nothing else, pick up a nominative determinism award for directing this particular piece.
Despite the plethora of short scenes, the story and characterisation develop organically and clearly over the 90 minutes or so of the piece. I had to suspend a fair bit of belief around the central conceit that a youngster might implement an NHS patient administration system alone in just a few weeks without encountering or causing any profound issues, but that only proves that I have spent too much of my working life thinking about informatics.
The cast all performed their parts convincingly, with top marks to Debra Baker who played the “seen it all before administrator” Angela.
Denzel Baidoo was the most comedic of the three, playing the naïve trainee Jay. One short scene, set to music, when Jay thinks he is alone in the office will live long in our memories.
If you are reading this piece soon after I have upped it, you have a chance still to see this production at The Bush, as it has been extended to 7 March. In Janie’s and my opinion, it deserves a transfer to gain a wider audience. It is a fun piece that made us both laugh a lot, but it also tackles a great many pertinent issues of our times in a thoughtful and warm-hearted way.
A rare miss for us at the Bush Studio. Nothing wrong with this play or the production, but it simply didn’t float our boats. It sounded modern, witty, interesting from the description, but in truth it is simply the story of an extra-marital affair.
I got a bit more out of it than Janie did, in that I felt able to enter the couple’s world. But in truth the story was very simple and the characters were so much the architects of their own misfortune it was hard to sympathise with them.
Below is the trailer for this play/production:
We ran into a gentleman I know as a nodding acquaintance from the health club, BWW, who sat virtually next to us. I wonder what he and his companion made of it. I might one day find out.
Janie was underwhelmed by the acting. I thought both were fine, I think it was the roles that were underwhelming and that the man, Jon Foster, in particular did not seem especially well cast. We’ve seen him several times before when, in my view, better cast and therefore better able to shine.
What Janie and I both agreed was that we didn’t sense the sexual chemistry the play was supposed to conjure. But we did have Nuki afterwards, by which I mean, a takeaway meal from Nuki’s Thai Kitchen. Very tasty.
The Trick is also a quirky piece, but differently so. It is about loss, bereavement and the ways we need to trick ourselves into keeping going through life.
I thought we might find such a piece hard to take this weekend – our next door neighbour at Noddyland, Barry, died on Thursday night. But actually the piece was very charming, unusual and entertaining, without being heavy at all.
My only beef with the piece is that it was very bitty and that some of the bits didn’t really make sense. One scene, where the two younger performers simply made breathing noises into microphones, seemed, to me, to simply be a bridge between one of the quirky scenes (in which one of those performers read the palm of a member of the audience) and the next substantive scene about the ageing, bereaved woman and her decline.
But the piece was clearly intended to confuse the audience a bit and mix various genres of performance, ranging from direct story-telling (the Isaac Bashevis Singer story, The Little Shoemaker, is “thrown in” at one point) to chamber drama to audience participation to conjuring tricks. Entertaining throughout.
Here’s Eve Leigh, the playwright, explaining herself as best she can about it:
After the Bush Studio run, which goes on to 23 March, The Trick is going to tour many parts of the UK – here is the trailer including those tour details:
This piece was very well performed by the four actors and cleverly directed and designed.
Janie and I really like short pieces of this kind. Perhaps it is because we are getting older, but we now find 70 minutes of interesting and entertaining stuff a better deal than several hours of drawn out drama.
Baffling in parts but well worth seeing in our view.
We’ve been fans of the Bush for yonks and have become especially enamored with the Studio there, since it opened eighteen months or so ago.
This short play, Lands, is exactly the sort of thing we like to see at a place like the Bush Studio.
It is really quite a strange piece. One young woman is obsessively, slowly working her way through a massive jigsaw puzzle while the other jumps up and down on a trampoline throughout most of the play.
Much is left unexplained, but the pair might well be a couple; at the very least there are strong hints that they know each other well and have done so for a long while.
In one early coup-de-theatre, they perform a wonderful synchronized dance to Ain’t That Terrible by Roy Redmond…
…a great track btw, that Daisy and I both remember dancing to in the clubs way back when. It had both of us wracking our brains (unsuccessfully) in our attempts to identify the record.
Ellie at the Bush kindly put us out of our misery with the song title and artist, which helped us to avoid our own domestic the following Monday. Thanks Ellie – otherwise I might have obsessively blogged and Daisy might have obsessively pole-danced non-stop for a week. Not safe.
But I digress.
There were some very funny moments in the play – not least that dance – but also several very poignant scenes. While the play is, in many ways, an absurdist piece, there is enough realism in the scenario and the manner in which the drama pans out to be very affecting.
Both Leah Brotherhead and Sophie Steer perform their parts extremely well; the switches of mood – a couple of times turning on a proverbial sixpence, very deftly done.
In some ways the nub of the play is the domestic drama about the obsessions that seem to be pulling these people apart from each other, but in other ways it is about the causes of such obsessions. Towards the end of the play, the Leah character rants about all the things she doesn’t care about. But of course she must care about those things to some extent if she feels motivated to rant quite so viscerally about not caring. Perhaps Leah’s obsessions (or both women’s obsessions) are ways of shutting out the world because they cannot cope with caring about so much that is wrong.
In truth we weren’t expecting a piece quite as challenging as this one but we agreed that we were very glad to have experienced it once we got home and started chatting about it over our supper.
This one, in the Bush Studio, was a two-hander with just a table, two chairs and two mikes as props. It was extraordinary how much “magic” the excellent performers, Charlotte Melia and Ashley Gerlach, manage to get out of that low-key set.
The play is about a reclusive but massively successful author of children’s fiction.
Deservedly good reviews and another short play/production that deserves a wider audience than The Bush Studio – I do hope it gets a transfer and/or tour.
This is the third time we have been to the new Bush Studio and the third time we have been thrilled by the results there. From our point of view, this is akin to the wonders of the Hampstead Downstairs as a source of top notch fringe theatre.
Spanning 15 years, the play depicts the fumbling, youthful love between Ramona and Jim as teenagers, as well as the lingering aftermath of those fleeting but life-changing events.
Here is an embedded trailer for the production, which shows snippets of the junior scenes:
The playwright, Sophie Wu, is a new name to us. Apparently she is more TV and film actress than playwright at this stage of her career. We’ll certainly be looking out for her plays again. Ramona Tells Jim is a charming, short piece – very impressive as an early effort.
This search term – click here – digs out plenty of reviews. In truth the reviews speak more highly of the production than the play, claiming some lack of depth and/or plausibility in the latter. But what do the reviewers know? We thought this was 80-90 minutes of high quality, thought-provoking, dark comedy.
Extremely well acted and directed too; the reviewers certainly agree with us on that. Director Mel Hillyard wowed us as recently as March with Scarlett at the Hampstead Dowstairs and also last year with the Brink at the Orange Tree. She is certainly a director to watch.
We had also seen Ruby Bentall before, although I had to look this up to recall where; in DNA and The Miracle at the Cottesloe yonks ago. All of the performers were very good indeed.
The audience had their moments on the night we attended. The Bush was very quiet that evening, as the next production in the main house (Of Kith and Kin – we’re going to that in a couple of week’s time) has not yet opened. Just before the doors were due to open (15 minutes before scheduled the start of the play), two members of staff went through and locked the door behind them. One couple, seeing people go in, went running up to the door and banged on it fervently, thinking that they had missed the start of the show, perhaps unused to 19:45 start times for the new studio rather than 19:30 in the main house.
“We must be the most stupid people on earth”, said the door-banging chap as the couple joined the rest of us in a sedate drinking/milling around mode for a few more minutes.
Actually, the most stupid people on earth award for the evening might go to the woman next to me who left her mobile phone on, noisily pinging through texts and e-mails during the 1998 scenes – very incongruous noise – until she realised the problem was her, at which point she tried to rectify the problem discreetly, hoping no-one would notice that it was her. Plenty of people noticed, love.
Next up for a stupid award was the woman who insisted on rattling her voluminous drink ice around in her glass like a teenager noisily munching popcorn in the cinema, then later cackling like a hyena at the fumbling sex scene which was surely whimsical pathos humour rather than guffaw humour to anyone old enough to know better, which this woman surely was.
Crumbs, the above paragraphs infer that we had an irritating evening but we really didn’t – we came home truly delighted with the play and the production. We had a light supper of salami and cream cheese baguettes with some salad stuff, washed down with a very jolly Dão red.
Highly commended by both me and Janie – we’ll be looking out again for the talent that was on show – writing, directing, producing and acting.
It is performed (alongside the author) by a different performer each night, who has not seen the script. We got Phelim McDermott, who is one of the artistic directors of Improbable. He was very good.
The piece is, on the surface, very simple, childish even. Yet the more you think about it, the more you realise that Nassim is making profound points about freedom of speech, not least the pains people like him go through when they leave their home country (in his case Iran) in order to communicate what they have to say in a foreign place and a foreign language.
We sat right at the front but managed to avoid the worst elements of the audience participation. Having said that, I got the dirtiest of dirty looks from Phelim when I tried to help him follow his instructions, by pointing to an “X marks the spot” which was located next to my seat.
We weren’t just moved and thoughtful; we laughed a lot during the 70 minutes or so. Nassim is clearly a very innovative and skilled dramatist; we’ll certainly look out for his work again.
This Bush run is an Edinburgh preview – I think this piece will go down very well in Edinburgh. It is then returning to The Bush for a while after Edinburgh – I recommend that you grab a ticket for that while/if you still can, if you like this sort of thing.
Janie and I had a crazy craving for Iranian food after Nassim’s homesick piece, so decided to try Rice Chiswick, which we found very satisfactory. Not quite Mohsen’s standard, but close and very convenient for the Bush.
Janie and I were very excited about this visit to the Bush – the first since the major refurbishment and our first visit to the new Studio.
We really like the way they have refurbished the bar, library and garden/yard to utilise the space so much better. Still a friendly vibe, too.
We bumped into my friend Nigel from the health club, who had popped into the bar with his girlfriend, Candice, ahead of a visit to the flicks around the corner.
The play was excellent. A short, two-hander of a chamber play; very touching and moving.
In the spirit of trying new things, we also tried Vietnamese food from Tem Tep in Church Street, which we’d been meaning to try for a while. Pretty good; we’ll try some more dishes from there for sure.
