AN EVENING OF CRIME SHORTS
Nottingham Lace Market Theatre

"The Zoo Story" and "Little Dolls" are the latest short plays to be performed in the bijou surroundings of the upstairs section of the Lace Market Theatre. The audience are almost within touching distance of the actors which makes it all the more difficult for the actors who can actually see the eyes of the audience and hear them breathing!

The Lace Market Theatre are renowned for producing plays of this sort, plays which are sometimes quite off the beaten track, but at times true gems such as these two plays.

"The Zoo Story" features two characters, Peter, an older man who works in the printing business relaxing on the park bench in Central Park one Sunday afternoon. An afternoon he will never forget for the rest of his life. He's happily married, two daughters, loving wife, two cats and two parakeets. Along comes Jerry a young man who really wants to have a conversation about, amongst other things, his visit to Central Park zoo. We find out all about his life, his love life, his lusty landlady and his landlady's dog, who Jerry tried to kill. Things then turn strange for the pair when they vie for possession of the park bench they are both sitting on, with drastic results for both of them.

A fascinating look at how the mind of a potential killer, who at first glance seems a regular guy, can U turn. Brilliant acting from both Guy Evans as Jerry and Richard Holmes as Peter and a fascinating piece of thought provoking theatre.

The second play is "Little Dolls" and this is dark in every sense of the word. Vicky is having therapy for an incident that happened when she was 11 years old, her therapist is John. They are sat in his office in the dark, because Vicky is now afraid of the dark, with a safety net lighter for when she becomes unable to take the dark any more. We hear of what she thinks she heard on the night that changed her life, but what really did happen and is there really a strange man following her around, and how did her 11 year old friend really die? So many questions that don't produce answers in this dark and increasingly sinister play which will literally have you on the edge of your seat.

The nervous and untrusting Vicky is played by Emma Hayes and the strangely mind controlling and quite scary therapist is played with great understatement by Matt Huntbach.

Both plays have a couple of things in common. The characters Jerry in "The Zoo Story" and Vicky in "Little Dolls" are both word weavers who are storytellers who will keep you hanging on to their every word. Simple sets keep you focused on the words and the characters. But not all the talent is on show because there's some sterling work done by the directors for both plays, Kareena Sims for "The Zoo Story" and Michael Darmola for "Little Dolls"

Both plays will leave you quite shocked and with plenty to talk, and think about when you leave the theatre. But don't hang around because they are only on until Saturday 3 May 2014.

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Review: An Evening of Crime Shorts, Lace Market Theatre

The title of this studio double bill misleads: both plays involve crime sure enough but that’s not the main thing linking them.

More importantly, they’re both wordy and demanding two-handers. For the most part not a lot happens in either piece, though each incorporates a lot of back story. Both have an air of barely contained menace, which in the case of the first play is eventually uncontained and spills out into something horrible.

In the first, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, two men from disparate social backgrounds meet on a bench in Central Park, Manhattan. Rough diamond Jerry, scruffy, long hair practically dripping with what looks like engine oil, imposes himself on Peter, treating him to a long inconsequential story. Peter is a prissy and correct middle-class publishing man. It’s an encounter of two different worlds.

Little Dolls by Nancy Harris is based on real events. A young girl, Vicky, who’s frightened of the dark, is talking to a psychiatrist, John. During a school trip to France her friend was murdered in her hostel bed, apparently by an intruder.

But was it? There’s more than a suggestion that somehow Vicky herself bears some sort of responsibility for her friend’s death. There’s even a vague hint that somehow John might be implicated.

Guy Evans (Jerry) gives the best performance of his Lace Market Theatre career; and relative newcomer Richard Holmes is first-rate as Peter. Each has the New York accent appropriate to character.

Emma Hayes’s Vicky is her debut performance for the Lace Market Theatre. The essential anxiety and agitation are beautifully done. Most of the time Matt Huntbach as John has simply to sit in his chair listening. Then, and when he has to do more, he’s completely convincing.

Directors Kareena Sims and Michael Darmola have delivered an absorbing evening’s theatre.

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Gareth Morgan went to see The Zoo Story and Little Dolls at the Lace Market Theatre

The Lace Market Theatre 2013-14 season continues its diverse programming with a double bill of one-act plays loosely linked by the theme of crime - Edward Albee's The Zoo Story and Nancy Harris' Little Dolls - staged in the intimate surroundings of their studio theatre, an excellent Sam Smith's Ale-stocked bar.

First up is Albee's 1958 tale of a chance meeting on a Central Park bench. Peter, a well off publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, two cats and two parakeets, is interrupted by deadbeat Jerry, who swings wildly from anti- to hyper-social. In his desperation to connect with someone, Jerry forces Peter to answer his invasive questions and listen to his stories. When Peter attempts to leave, Jerry turns violent and the whole exchange climaxes in a moment of savagery from both men who become territorial and cruel.

The performances here were excellent - the reserved Peter, played by Richard Holmes, was a highlight of the evening for his constant work even in the long speeches of Jerry. He was fully engaged and his complimentary acknowledgments and reactions never overshadowed the storytelling. There was great skill in this telling too, both on the part of the writer and the performers. Guy Evans, as Jerry, delivers his spiralling monologues with such menace that two members of the audience left when he retold his attempt to kill his landlady's dog (proving Martin McDonagh's adage "you can't kill dogs").

The performance was let down by over-long videos which bookended the performance, but added little, and a patchy soundscape of park sounds, which again wasn't totally necessary. In both cases these ought to have followed the minimalist rules of the set - just a bench - allowing the text to be the main point of focus. The crispness of the acting, anchored by the stillness of Holmes' Peter allowing Evans' Jerry to be a more feral presence, was the real strength of this staging and made this a captivating watch.

The second performance, Little Dolls, was a more modern (written in 2008) and even darker affair. A young woman, Vicky, tells her story to John, a psychiatrist. Vicky is afraid of the dark after a school trip where her best friend was murdered in the hostel bed next to her as she slept. As the telling of Vicky's story continues, John becomes controlling and sinister until we come to question whether he is trying to make her better or make her worse.

As a play Little Dolls is poorly written. It is full of tropes and stereotypes straight from the Operation Yewtree handbook making nothing that happened especially surprising, interesting or shocking; as an audience we knew exactly where we were going. The characters weren't compelling despite some good acting from the actors and with John's ominous twist toward the end it seemed to do little but show a continuing cycle of abuse enacted upon Vicky. For me, I'd rather see a man talk about trying to kill a dog.

The staging of Little Dolls for me ducked a few brave decisions. The lighting of the piece was neither black-out nor fully lit - I would have loved to have seen it performed in pitch black where Vicky's 'safety blanket', a lighter which she could use to break the darkness in which she was in, could have been used to even greater effect. The lighting effect we did get was one reminiscent of Dario Argento's 1977 horror classic Suspiria. The production employed both the Italian director's use of colour in the constant green backlighting of the action and the creepy main theme by prog favourites Goblin.

Emma Hayes as Vicky give a creditable performance but she lacked a level of stillness to make the menace of the piece really tell. As John Matt Huntbach, Richard Holmes as Peter in The Zoo Story, had long periods of listening to the telling of the story but his engagement never felt as total as the man in the play that preceded Little Dolls. His presence later in the play, when able to become more threatening, did work well however his over-actorly delivery of his lines made his performance feel like just that: a performance. This all said, these promising actors weren't helped by a poor script.

This was a bold piece of programming by the Lace Market Theatre and, with their double-bill of Samuel Beckett coming up, they should be applauded for doing something a little different, even if not everything is a solid gold hit.

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