Wilt at The Ustinov Studio

The great attraction of Fringe Festivals is the unbridled hope that one left turn may lead to something extraordinary. The thrill of being in on some secret - of being early to a show or to an artist whose audience you confidently expect to grow in the future - keeps us, or at least keeps me, wandering wide-eyed down alleyways each August.

Amongst Bristol’s proudest theatrical exports is Ad Infinitum, which has for 18 years been a pioneering and distinguished force in UK physical theatre. The multi-award winning company’s most recent offering, Last Rites, is now gracing Bristol Old Vic’s main stage.

The acclaimed nonverbal multi-sensory show 50 Ways To Kill A Slug opened at The Wardrobe Theatre last night, to an audience that did not know what had hit it. Makers Dre Spisto and Joana Nastari have devised an anarchic love-letter to nature’s underdog, and in doing so have ironically created something deeply human.

In their 19th Summer Festival, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School (BOVTS) is showcasing its graduating directors and designers with four double-bills at the Weston Studio.

When Bristol Old Vic Theatre School announces a production, one tends to be in for a treat. The prestigious institution – whose alumni include Daniel Day-Lewis, Olivia Colman and Patrick Stewart – has a habit of creating work that wouldn’t be out of place on any stage at all.

You may have noticed a native field maple garlanding the foyer at Bristol Old Vic in recent weeks, celebrating the arrival of Nancy Medina’s third production as Artistic Director: The Beautiful Future Is Coming.

From what is theatre composed? Some typically requisite elements might include actors, a story, a stage and an audience. Yesterday evening Tobacco Factory Theatres played host to Voloz Collective’s The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much, a show which answers that question with another: where, precisely, does a story occur? Allow me to elaborate.

Yesterday evening, Tobacco Factory Theatres hosted an evening of original theatre presented by Bristol School of Acting and The Wardrobe Ensemble. The double-bill, devised by the graduating class of the ‘Acting and Devised Theatre’ BA programme, saw the class divided into men (The Britz) and women (Codetta). Having apparently forgotten their manners, the men went first.

William Shakespeare’s iconic play is brought sharply into the present at Bristol Old Vic, with well-crafted multi-syllabic rhymes and a renewed youthfulness. This production of Romeo and Juliet will succeed in bringing new eyes to theatre, but is ultimately never at home.

There is such a thing as a well-written but essentially unworkable play. That, in my opinion, is what we have in …blackbird hour, currently showing at Bristol Old Vic‘s Weston Studio. Playwright babirye bukilwa’s script is poetic but not dramatic, leading to an overcompensation from actors attempting to fill 80 minutes with a play in which nothing happens.

Nancy Medina’s CV as artistic director of Bristol Old Vic grew one line longer last night as A Good House opened on the famous old theatre’s main stage. The show is a co-production with the Royal Court and in association with The Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Following the supreme brilliance of Choir Boy, I and others were especially keen to see what the Brooklyn native would select as her second offering.

Having watched, reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed a short preview of Gurt Haunted a few weeks ago, I was delighted by the opportunity to see the full show. Gurt Haunted takes us behind and within the scenes of a paranormal television show, a medium – if you’ll pardon the pun – long overdue effective satirisation. I’d estimate that I started laughing somewhere between 12 and 14 seconds into the show, and with strong moral effort had contained the giggles by sunrise the following day.

It can be strange to consider the physicality of a novel. That stories – words on a page – have a form and a force beyond the intellectual is at once a bafflement and a truism. Novels – well, to be precise, great novels – have the strangest habit of breaching their natural borders of the mind and metastasising into the body. This pilgrimage of wisdom, emotion and truth throughout our nervous system suggests there is something charismatic or numinous about the literary process.

That poetry is a radical and revolutionary medium is a truism approaching cliché, but not every page of its rich history knows the light of the sun. Emilia Bassano is one such strangely neglected giant of history. Born some 200 years before Mary Wollstonecraft, at the age of 42, Emilia became the first woman to have her poetry published in England.

Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner once remarked of María Irene Fornés that “her work sits in the ear like luxurious reason”. My first on-stage exposure to the late Cuban-American giant came yesterday evening at Bristol School of Acting’s graduating students’ production of Fefu and Her Friends at Tobacco Factory Theatres, and this inexhaustibly pithy observation has enjoyed an unbroken residence in my mind ever since.

Reviewing Stefan Mohamed is like trying to paint a song. Farewell Tour resists the treatment of ordinary prose; it wriggles free of its own outline and burns down its house. It politely declines. It stands on its head. It berates its purpose. At one stage I wondered if it was entirely a scheme to spite the idiot critics who dare translate creativity itself into stupid words on a stupid page.

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. I could feel my grip on this useless mantra – or its grip on me – fading fast. I was watching the engagement department of a London theatre cluelessly discuss the absence of working class people from their audiences. In lofty tones they mourned the would-be salvation of these wretched souls; why don’t they come to see shows? Taking a moment or two to relish the moral panic on these ordinarily unflappable faces, I surrendered entirely my grip on the mantra, and found I had no volition: they do. They’re at the pantomime down the road.

“Silence”, wrote Rumi, “is the language of God, all else is poor translation.” This remark occurred to me – as these things always do – approximately five minutes after it may have been useful. I was trudging down St. Michael’s Hill, having recently attended Communion: Night One at The Mount Without, ruing the missed opportunity to submit the above excerpt to the scrutiny of the artists by whom I’d been so recently spellbound.

The unquestionable greatness of William Shakespeare has never in my view been more beautifully or more totally surmised than in the opening line of Matthew Arnold’s poem Shakespeare: “Others abide our question. Thou art free”. Encountering this giant – as most artists will have to sooner or later – can be intimidating. Towering genius casts a long shadow, and that dark has stultified many actors and directors who brush up against it.