Amelia Renard Archives - The Real Chrisparkle

For the first time, the Final Year Actors at Northampton University have been invited to present their plays in London, at the Jacksons Lane Theatre in Highgate, which is an exciting opportunity to be seen in the Capital City with all its obvious attractions (although performing on the stage of the Royal in Northampton is not to be sneezed at either).

The first of these plays is DNA, a one-act play by Dennis Kelly, that originally saw light of day as part of a National Theatres Connections season. It’s a smart, surprising and rather disturbing play where a group of teenagers commit an act of atrocity on another teenager, with apparently disastrous consequences. How far will they go to cover up their crime, and, after multiple lies and deceits, does there come a time simply to stop digging?

I must be honest, gentle reader; at first, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy this. The play started with some artistic movement where all the cast loomed and merged together from different parts of the stage for some significant meaning that totally passed me by. Whilst I appreciate the skill, it didn’t (for me) add to the story-telling or character-understanding in any way. The older I get, the more I feel that life is too precious to waste. Just get on with the play!

And then the early parts of the play itself seemed rather difficult for the audience to get a grip on what was going on, and I was feeling a little frustrated at the rather stagey, unnatural speech patterns. But then, after a short time, everything just clicked into place. The play, through this eloquent and revealing production, offers an alarming insight into pack mentality and the abuse that can exist between friends – both physical and mental.

Running throughout the play is a central storyline of the needy relationship between Leah and Phyl, who’s clearly the boss of the outfit. Leah constantly seeks Phyl’s approval, her input, her recognition; and Phyl delights in refusing to acknowledge her at all. In the end, Leah cannot take this any more and so packs her bags and escapes; and the final scene shows Phyl, sans Leah, still tight-lipped, but no longer through dominance, but through a sad emptiness. Tiffany Mae Rivers gives a stunning performance as the garrulous Leah, burbling and murfling her way through life, filling every silence with needy drivel; and Maddy Ogedengbe is excellent as the stony-faced, insolent Phyl, buttering her waffles with controlling cruelty. The whole play balances on this relationship and it works superbly well.

The whole cast put in a great ensemble effort, but I particularly enjoyed the upstart rivalry to the Phyl regime offered by Zoe Elizabeth as Rikki, the “good girl” frustration of Amelia Renard’s Danni who sees her prospect of dental training going up in smoke, and Georgi McKie’s belligerent Lou. Big credit to Katie Lawson for taking over the role of Bryony at short notice and making the character chillingly unhinged.

This is a play where the characters’ thoughts run away with themselves before their mouths have the chance to catch up with them; as a result there are lots of half-formulated sentences, and phrases left hanging in the air. It’s a tough job to make them sound convincing and natural but the cast did an excellent job of conveying the flow of concentration whilst still making it sound sense.

I thoroughly enjoyed this production and thought everyone did sterling work! Congratulations to all.

There’s a scene in Tom Kempinski’s play Duet For One, loosely based on the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pré, and which I remember reduced me to tears when I saw it back in 1980, when the musician Stephanie, who can no longer play the violin because of her disability, bawls her heart out to her psychotherapist. “Music is the purest expression of humanity there is”, she affirms, and I was strongly reminded of that theory when watching Carousel Theatre Company’s An Error in the Medley, a one-woman play performed by Amelia Renard.

We find ourselves in an exclusive salon, having an audience with a young musical phenomenon, Leonie Owens. Miss Owens is a composer extraordinaire, with (one presumes) a catalogue of great achievements for her young years, and fanning a desire to soothe the fevered brow of the general populace with her amazing skill. Will she play for us? No, rather like Princess Anne said many years ago, she doesn’t do tricks. Maybe she would be so kind as to just pick out a few notes to give an example of how music can soar and bring light to others? (Hence my memory of Duet for One, mentioned above). Just a few then; and she falters at the keyboard. She graciously allows a short Q&A to follow, but is quickly thrown by the preponderance of questions about her parents. Why are they concentrating on them, rather than her? It’s just not fair!

The big question that the promotional text poses is just how far can a dream take you? Leonie’s desire to become a great composer has blinded her to the fact that she can’t actually play. It’s all a fantasy, which falls apart when subjected to the simplest questions. When exposed as a sham, she can only see one noble way out of the mess she’s created for herself.

Ms Renard has devised a fascinating character; pompous, faux-refined, patronising, and with an ugly superiority complex. When the mask slips, she’s just an ordinary young woman with dreams way beyond her ability. It’s a very good performance; I loved the arrogant tone with which she gave voice to Leonie’s pontificating. It was only a shame that there wasn’t something a little more substantial to the play. It wasn’t enough just to see Leonie being Leonie; we needed to observe her actively do something. It starts with a long pause, whilst she’s getting her CDs in order; and there’s another long pause in the middle, between the showdown with the audience’s questions and the confession that it’s all a lie – and these pauses, with her back to the audience so we couldn’t see her facial expressions, unfortunately served to reduce the drama rather than heighten it. The end result was like a tiny two-act play in miniature; fragile, delicate, and like Lady Macbeth’s candle, out too briefly.

There’s the basis of a really good play here, but I think it just needed a little more work and exploration to capture our attention fully.