Home-grown and imported plays in Ipswich this spring
The spring 2012 season at the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich is noticeable for the number of companies performing for only a couple of nights, as well as for some interesting shows mounted by the theatre itself and its associate production companies. It makes for an eclectic mix; there’s bound to be something most weeks to suit a potential audience’s taste.
Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce is the major in-house production, following A Chorus of Disapproval and Noises Off. it plays between 19 April and 12 May. Then there’s this year’s Pulse Fringe Theatre Festival between 25 May and 9 June, with performances all over the town. Many – as attendees will know from previous years – happen in somewhat strange locations.
The New Wolsey justifiably prides itself on its thriving youth theatre groups and this season’s Young Company production in the Studio from 17 to 21 April is DCB Pierre’s Vernon God Little . Interestingly, this play about an American schoolboy who kills his classmates is also the choice of Norwich Theatre Royal’s Youth Theatre Company at the end of March.
Visiting companies bring some intriguing shows. First off, from 21 to 28 February, is the Out of Joint and Chichester Festival production of Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, which is directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Collective Artistes offer a new play by Chuck Mike called Zhe on 25 February and there’s another short title in the shape of Hull Truck’s DNA on 28 and 29 February (well, 2012 is a leap year).
Spymonkey and the Royal & Derngate of Northampton offer a distinctly fresh look at classic Greek tragedy – prepare to be amused. This is Oedipussy and you can savour it from 7 to 10 March. Also with a Greek theme is – most appropriately – The Games on 20 March. As this comes from Spike Theatre, Unity Theatre and The Met, it’s forecast to be neither Olympian nor Olympic. Just good fun.
Souvenir d’Anne Frank on 21 and 22 March is an Ensemble presentation concerned with a young Japanese girl and the rose named for the Dutch Jewish girl who died in a concentration camp just before the end of the Second World War. That conflict is also the concern of Spitfire Solo, written and performed by Nicholas Collett on 12 April.
Townsend Productions offer Robert Tressall’s The Ragged Trousered Philosophers on 23 and 24 March. A collaboration between Talawa Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse has produced a new staging with an all-Black cast of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which you can see between 3 and 7 April. It’s directed by Ian Brown.
From Nottingham’s Playhouse between 13 and 17 March comes a song drama by Eric Gedeon directed by Giles Croft called Forever Young. It’s set in the year 2050, and we have to imagine that the theatre itself is now a care home. Stranger things have happened… Opera della Luna does the classics in its own way. On 1 and 2 March you can meet Léhar’s The Merry Widow in a new English-language production.
Nor are very young playgoers neglected. The series of Saturday shows in the Studio includes Hiccup Theatre with Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat on 11 February, Aesop’s Fables from Theatr Na N’Og on 18 February, two shows by Proteus – How To Be a Hero on 3 March and Kid Carpet & the Noisy Animals on 28 April – as well as Chickenlicken by DNA on 10 March.
