The Trick by Eve Leigh, Bush Studio, 23 February 2019

Bush Theatre

Our first visit to The Bush this year – our previous visit had been to the Studio to see a quirky piece, Lands:

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.

Wildefire by Roy Williams, Hampstead Theatre, 7 November 2014

A play about modern policing in the inner-London suburbs, the central character being a policewoman who might have bitten off more than she can chew in that environment.

Roy Williams is a highly skilled playwright and this subject-matter is right up his street.

Lots of subplots – domestic violence, police corruption (or is it) in attempts to infiltrate criminal gangs etc.

In some ways the play was all over the place and in that sense unsatisfactory. We went on a Friday after work (and Harry Mograns) – we were quite exhausted by the end of it, despite the fact that it is a short piece (not even 90 minutes long).

But it was gripping and had some great scenes and some superb acting in it – we were glad to have seen this piece.

Here is a link to the Hampstead resource on this play/production.

Below is a little “behind the scenes” vid with Roy Williams & more:

On the whole the critics were underwhelmed by the piece – click here for a link to the reviews.