Monday, October 15, 2007

Theatre Festival fun

Yesterday I took in the last two shows of my theatre festival experience for this year. I did a lot better than last year, because I actually managed to see almost half of the shows for which I bought tickets, as opposed to last year, when I think I saw maybe two plays, largely because of medication-related illness. This year, I managed to miss plays due to bus not coming, traffic being bad on match day, being ill with an incredibly bad cold and deciding I just couldn't sit through four hours of Eugene O'Neill.

All of what I did see was excellent, though. I will get around to reviewing them all in depth (I bet you can't wait) at a later date, but for now, here's the list.

Radio Macbeth
in the Project: I always enjoy the Project, and it has the best seating of all the venues I went to, for me anyway. Nice, straight-backed seat, banquette style so that if it's full you can all budge up, but if it's not so full you can spread out a bit, as a kind of reward for supporting less commercial theatre.

Fragments
in the Tivoli: Amusingly, the Tivoli seems to be playing a Beckett-style joke on audiences with its seating. It looks very comfortable on the face of things, being proper old-style cinema seats, but then, when you try to sit down, you realise that there is so little leg room that you have to scrunch yourself right up into a ball and wedge your legs firmly into the back of the person in front. Neither Queenie nor Mister M would have been able to sit through this show, and I almost didn't manage it either. If it had been longer than an hour, there would have been trouble.

Road to Nowhere
at the O'Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College: Functional seating, but no points to whatever bright spark decided to book a show that would attract an audience of seniors (many of whom would, obviously, have mobility issues ranging from the slight to the severe) into an auditorium where the toilets are on the second floor.

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