Katie Blundell Archives - The Real Chrisparkle

The second of the three Third Year Students’ plays at the Royal and Derngate is Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, a series of 49 interconnected playlets, with some leeway given to individual productions as to the order in which they are presented. Some of them are long enough to give you a full sense of narrative and characterisation; some are so short that they are barely a few words delivered within five seconds. The result is an intriguing blend of human situations, presented in an apparently (but not entirely) random order; there are plenty of laugh out loud moments, plus a few tragic scenarios thrown into the mix.

Under Barbara Houseman’s direction, the ensemble of ten deliver a smart, snappy, constantly refreshing show that holds your attention from start to finish. Everyone gives a great performance; with so many entrances and exits, and costume and character changes, this is a hard show to get absolutely right – but the cast nailed it. A particular challenge in this play is that there are so many conversations where a line is left dangling because the speaker is either being interrupted or can’t quite find le mot juste. But everyone pretty much kept the conversational pace going in all their scenes, which really helped keep the show moving.

Highlights for me were Archy Mackillop telling his secret, Charlie Franklin as the spoilt brat who won’t say sorry, Saim Shafique explaining why his dreams gave him carte blanche to have an affair, Will Merrylees showing off his language skills, and pretty much everything that Katie Blundell and Sophia Foster did. Indeed Ms Foster can turn a characterisation around on a sixpence; always delivering with superb control and wry humour. But the entire cast contributed to the success of this production – congratulations to you all.

Not much more to say about this show really – if you managed to see it, you had a treat!

P. S. The Martin Lawrence Acting Awards are presented every year to the best Actress and Actor. My choice for Best Actress for the year would be Sophia Foster.

This is how Bound by History is described online: “After several years apart, a group of friends reunite and travel to Bulgaria to complete their Professor’s historical research when his health suddenly declines.”

Old friendships and rivalries are renewed as four ex-students of archaeology, devoted to their Professor, who is now in a dementia home, agree to travel back to Bulgaria to find a hidden artefact in a dig before homes are built over the site. But there’s no guarantee that the artefact is there. If they find it, their names will go down in archaeological history. If they don’t, a lot of time, energy and money will have been wasted. The four were obviously thick as thieves back in the day, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Can they keep their rivalry and personal issues at bay long enough to find the treasure?

This is an extremely well imagined story, in that it takes the fairly standard situation of a reunion of old friends and workmates to see if they still get on, but transports them into the highly original setting of an archaeological dig in Bulgaria. With jobs, businesses, and parental responsibilities to contend with, it’s unsurprising that they get tetchy at times and have to juggle their lives, sometimes at the expense of the others. But it’s a good examination of a group of people working together at close quarters in a controlled environment. Sadly, though, the play did feel a little long, and I thought that many of the conversations lacked depth and drama.

That said, from the acting perspective, I thought this was the best intertwined ensemble performance of all the Flash Fringe shows I’ve seen so far. The four actors – Meg Mayers, Ellis Reynolds, Luis Dias and Katie Blundell – dovetail together beautifully and perform with great trust and understanding of the others. In particular, I thought Mr Dias and Ms Blundell gave first class performances, with superb clarity of diction, stage presence and perfectly placed confidence. That stage punch that Mr Dias dealt out to Mr Reynolds was a stunner!