Short & Sweet
Nine short plays, eight directors, twelve actors: Short and Sweet is a promising sounding pot-pourri of fledgling talent and new name dramatists beyond the usual fringe circuit. In reality, it’s a sorry mélange of feeble sketch material and awkward acting heavy with the sound of dull thuds and limp laugh lines.
Eight of the plays are strung out on the distinctly frayed thread of James Shermack’s linking monologue for a clapped out comedian, ending with an American short, The Chair, which won this year’s Long Island One Act festival (no big deal, one imagines): two hosts, spiritedly played by Scott Christie and Fiona Gordon, deal with the fact that a chair ate their dinner guests.
I felt sorry for Sam Harrison, so outstanding in the recent Salad Days, having to lark around as a tree in a dreadful, so-passé-it’s-prehistoric send-up of drama school exercises in Kirsten Anderson’s The True Story. And I had my first (and, I hope, last) real taste of toast abuse in a breakfast row between siblings, Andrew Muir’s Mummy Loves You, tautly directed by Ben De Wynter.
Tommy Kearney’s Five One is at least an amusing idea: five politically correct soccer supporters turning their latent wrath on a female rival supporter at a schoolboy game. And an impotent middle-aged punter in Russell Obeney’s Candy gets himself going with a litany of the Chelsea team (with poor Anna Sambrooks feeling the midfield surge in her lacy lingerie).
I also now know what a geocache is: a geek and his potty-mouthed pal go searching for one in Rachel Barnett’s two-hander. A widow and an illegitimate daughter cross swords over a coffin in David Drury’s A Woman of No Standing. And a married couple discuss separate sexual habits in Steve Lambert’s Tea & Filth.
The whole programme seems pointless and dispiriting if intended to suggest that good work is still slipping through the new plays network. One thing you can say, though: these writers can only get better, and no harm done if they do.
