Eastern Daily Press, 26 April 2010: T'is Pity She's A Whore
Forbidden love (incest), obsessive jealousy, teenage desire and problems endured by parents wrapped in gruesome revenge are the ingredients of the latest from RoughCast Theatre given two interesting innovations. Written about 1630, this is a post-Elizabethan/Jacobean classic, drawing heavily on Romeo and Juliet, Othello and other revenge tales. What RoughCast do is to make it relevant to a modern audience. The first big experiment is to to combine young actors from regional company The Keeper's Daughter, with regular and older performers from RoughCast. The result is a realistic generational conflict.
Directed and produced by Mark Finbow and Emma Martin, they take convincing parts themselves. Young players Ryan Hill and Alice Mottram bring style to the doomed sibling-lovers. Danny Ridealgh and Adrian McKeogh complement the strengths of Simon Evans, Amy Gibbons, Pat Quorn and Paul Barker. The second, effective development is a traverse stage, the audience halved across a rectangular space, the action brought closer to more people. The relationships between older and younger people ring totally true, and the quality of acting prevents the savage cruelty becoming comic.
Recommended for all ages.
Diss Express/Plays international: Tis Pity She's A Whore
RoughCast Theatre Company gave us, in John Ford's 17th century play, a rare chance to see Jacobean revenge tragedy. Like the Gothic novel, the genre sprang up in an over-ripe flowering of blood-soaked dramas, with horrid laughter, a high body count and the tares of incest.
In Mark Finbow's production, with the audience on either side of the action, the older characters are smartly suited, while the young are straight from high school. Ryan Hill and Alice Mottram, as the forbidden lovers, are as passionate as Romeo and Juliet. Most brothers and sisters would be at each other's throats. But here it seems natural that a good-looking boy and a coltish coquette should fall in love. Adrian McKeogh (Bergetto) and Ben Willmott (Poggio) provide nerdish humour among the stabbings. Amy Gibbons, as Hippolita, masters the high-flown style of anguish, lubricious revenge and harrowing death. With actors like Pat Quorn, Paul Baker, Pat Parris and Simon Evans, as well as director Mark Finbow and producer Emma Martin, this was a cast packed with talent and experience. The production gave you an urge to see more plays of that period, like The White Devil and The Revenger's Tragedy.
Basil Abbott
Radio Suffolk: Alarms and Excursions by Michael Frayn
Please click here (2.5 MB MP3 file) for the full interview from 30th April.
Hedda Gabler: November - December 2006
Eastern Daily Press - David Porter:
"... a sharp, well-costumed and plausible presentation". On Sarah Farrar's performance - "a tour-de-force, from manipulative comedy one moment to subtle menace the next - her pent up anger and impatience reinforced by a uniquely expressive face".
East Anglian Daily Times - Ivan Howlett:
"wonderful stuff, beautifully and classically constructed and played with passion, clarity and aplomb by RoughCast Theatre. Sarah Farrar plays Hedda with a taut, nervy desperation and there are nicely balancing performances all round with Paul Baker's Judge Brack - smiling insidious and corrupt, the weather vane for the world Hedda sees as almost inescapable".
Diss Mercury - Basil Abbott:
"Sarah Farrar's Hedda is a coiled spring fighting 19th century Norse propriety ...... with a maleficent
glance, a mouth that pouts and a smile like sunlight glinting on a bayonet, she ignites this complex heroine".
Diss Express - Paul Monkhouse:
"A classic play and an utterly wonderful production".
4 Chekhov Comedies: November 2002
Plays International - 'Russian Plays are a Treat' - Basil Abbott (19 November 2002):
Such is the acting strength of the RoughCast Theatre Company that you could draw a top quality company from the people who were doing Front of House. Four Comedies by Chekhov were introduced by director Bruce Cox as the playwright himself, even if he looked more like Krushchev. Russian plays need actors who can convey volcanic emotions and yet be aware of that painful strain of shyness and embarrassment which runs through their literature. In The Proposal they had the excellent Simon Evans, always a total actor, as a suitor whose wooing founders on the rocks of property ownership. He, Christine Lucy and Hugh Gandy as her father, enacted a splenetic scene which was a perfect dummy run for a marriage made in Siberia. Alan Huckle (who appeared in three of the plays) then gave a tour de force monologue on The Evils of Tobacco, which was as good as any of the Talking Heads. The Wedding presented a Dickensian gathering which made you wonder if the company could have a go at Nicholas Nickleby. Among them, Mike How as a Russian naval Commander, swamping proceedings like a Dreadnought, stood out. The dream ticket was Barry Givens and Vanessa Webster in The Bear. They are two of my favourite actors. Barry is a big gentle fellow who lives and breathes theatre and has great range.