4 Star Review!!!

Review of Pint, Plate, Performance

"Food for body and soul"by Simon Dale for remotegoat on 02/10/09

Pint, Plate Performance at Central Station, King's Cross - all for £7? Surely not.

Three Person'd God, a monologue written by Craig Jordan Baker and performed by Sophie Talbot kicked off the evening. It was a philosophical examination of a woman, an actress, playing three roles - an activist, a barren woman (her label, not mine) and an actress - which increasingly bleed into one another so that she (and we) are left increasingly uncertain as to who the real person is, where one role stops and another begins: which is reality, which is performance.

Set in an unnamed dystopia, it also raises questions of state versus individual and the struggle of the human spirit in the face of sweeping state tyranny.

Performed with passion and fluency, Sophie Talbot's portrayal of the woman came alive most in the third section as she shifted from the stage to the wings of the audience and delivered her third role in which all roles blurred into one, evoking a powerful sense of personal dislocation and isolation.

Next up was Sally Beaumont with her piece The Other Side of Everything which, as with Craig Jordan Baker's short play, delighted in and revered the richness of language. The play mused upon language and communication, with particular focus on the inadequacy of language within relationships.

Sally Beaumont's character wrestles with the heights to which imagination and language can soar, and the very different reality when you let another into one's life or try to express oneself through words. Her monologue is punctuated by what we assume to be her memories - brought to life life with gusto by Helen Jessica Liggat and Matthew Betteridge whose humour and energy inhabited and gave crackle to the prosaic domestic exchanges, the type that happen regularly in most relationships (think woman talking, trying to engage the man in conversation, the man replying in monosyllables while he tries to read the paper), which were all too familiar to most couples in the audience! They were nice vignettes and a deft depiction of the divide between (in this case) genders and more widely, humans. Language can be as much a barrier as a tool for understanding.

Sally Beaumont delivered a strong and varied performance, wholly believable as a creative, impassioned individual struggling to bridge the gap between inner and outer life, oneself and one's different self in the context of a relationship and society.

Neither play offered a traditional narrative structure or conclusion, though this was deliberate rather than the result of fudgy writing or direction. Sometimes, though, you can be too esoteric at the expense of narrative, too wedded to the search for assonance, alliteration and rhyme, or reclaiming oft-neglected words; it can become to laboured, too self-conscious, weighing the writing down rather than letting it take flight. This wasn't the case here, but there was the odd moment I felt it was in danger of reaching that tipping point.

An elderly gentleman next to me confided that it wasn't his cup of tea, though he went on to say that he had thought it was drag act night at Central Station. I took his point, however, which was, as he explained, that he wanted something a bit more immediate, less intellectual. Unlike a previous incarnation of the evening I have seen from this company, Tuesday night was more experimental, less easy entertainment that the outright comedy I had seen before. His point was that in a pub atmosphere, a little background noise from surrounding venues now and then rearing its head, belly-laugh comedy is a more natural fit. I think there's room for both.So the evening gave food for thought and then some rousing traditional celtic folk music from The Northern Celts to round off the night.I didn't sample the actual food, as I had a dodgy tum (which didn't stop me sampling the pint, which I can report was very satisfactory), but judging from the empty plates around me it seemed to go down well. £7 for a pint, a plate and an evening of entertainment - hard to beat.

Keep your eyes out for more from the team, as Pint, Plate and Performance is set to become a monthly event - and one you should get yourself along to.The writers are part of The Lucky Dogs playwrights' collective.