Be Prepared
In his quaint, wry style of storytelling Matthew Bellwood comes close to a reincarnation of an Alan Bennet character; his voice is gentle, his gestures are small and precise and he has the habit of taking a studied pause before revealing something profound about an everyday occurrence. These characteristics are undeniably endearing and the audience quickly warms to him and his mixed bag of stories.
In his stories Bellwood takes the, often mundane, incidents of his life and draws out a deeper meaning. Although this seems a fairly conventional method for crafting a narrative, it is also a very frank and direct way of speaking to the audience. Bellwood doesn’t dress-up his stories; however, he does bring in artefacts from his life as a way of illustrating and documenting the stories he tells, which gives the whole show a sort of show-and-tell feel.
Most people could scour their memory for moments in their life that could be weaved into a story, where Bellwood differs is in his assuming honesty to draw something meaningful and unpretentious out of life’s muddle.
– Charlotte Pegram
