CityLife

Hell is not winding back the videotape

The Judgement Of Mr Jenkins

ROSS Andrews' The Judgement Of Mr Jenkins turned out to be one of the big successes of the 2006 24:7 Theatre Festival.

It picked up the Best Fringe Production award at that year's M.E.N Theatre Awards and also became becoming one of the three plays from the festival invited to take part in Bolton Octagon's *Best Of' selection.

The following year, Ross's Eating Out, again produced by Second Nature Theatre Company, was nominated for the Best New Play award in our Theatre Awards while this year's 24:7 play ContreCoup, although it divided audiences, has already won the Best New Writing Buxton Festival Fringe Award.

Now, with the support of Oldham's Coliseum Theatre, Ross and Second Nature have produced a new version of The Judgment Of Mr Jenkins, which will play at Buxton, throughout Cheshire and in London and as well as at Studio Salford.

Dark

In this dark comedy about “life, death and corporate mistakes”, Mr Jenkins wakes from a disturbed sleep in the middle of the night with indigestion, only to find a stranger in the house.

Hell has been privatised, and a representative from Souls-R-Us has arrived to collect his soul. But he isn't dead, or at least not yet. To make matters worse, Mr Jenkins discovers that he is off to Hell due to the new *points system'.

He's told that he has annoyed several people enough to warrant his place in Hell and that his other crimes include not rewinding the video before taking it back to the shop, using his mobile phone loudly on a train, not putting the toilet seat down and using the 10 items or fewer till at the supermarket “when he knew he had more in his basket”.

“We decided to do it again because audiences loved it and they wanted more. But also because we noticed that when audiences came out they'd be talking about it and we wanted to incorporate that in some way,” Ross says.

“I was keen to keep the first act as the first act, because we know that the plot works at that sort of length. So we're pretty much keeping that as it has been with a second half that I can only describe as *a customer experience workshop. The key Souls-R-Us characters lead this workshop, which is almost like a post-show discussion but with the characters, not with actors. Obviously, a lot of it is scripted but, if the audiences want to join in with the discussion, then the characters will go with that.”

Afterlife

Among the topics for discussion, says Ross, will be the rules of the afterlife. “and, as those of you who've seen the original play will know, some of the characters hold pretty firm views on that subject.

“So it's a development of the first act and it's going to be somewhat different every night, depending on how the audience want to interact with the *customer experience workshop' element, with some room also for improvisation. It is going to be a bit experimental but we wanted to add to it, we didn't want to spoil it.

“I've been to enough comedy gigs to know that there are times when you just want to be left alone,” he says reassuringly, “but if people in the audience do want to join in, as seems to be more popular these days, then we can accommodate that.”

The success of Jenkins has come as “a pleasant surprise,” he admits, although it can be a bit of a double-edged sword. “It's nice to be popular but sometimes people expect everything else you do to be similar.

“The two things I've done since with Second Nature for 24:7 have been a bit darker, which has been quite consciously what I wanted to do but you do sometimes hear people almost complaining that they aren't more like Jenkins.

Superstition

“ContreCoup especially was something I wanted to write knowing that it was going to be very much like Marmite, in that you either liked it or you didn't and there wasn't really much room for being halfway in between.

“But I'd rather have a small group of people loving it than having a lot more people saying 'that was all right'.

"Even the people who didn't like it, though, have tended to say they felt that way because the subject matter itself made them slightly uncomfortable, which was partly why I wanted to write it.”

He's going to be returning, he says, to both Eating Out and ContreCoup, restoring them to the length “they should have been in the first place. Both of those plays suffered, I feel in retrospect, from being made to fit into the one-hour 24:7 format, although I can't thank the festival enough for the profile they've given to me and other Northwest writers.”

In the more immediate future, though, Ross is going to go on holiday and then “go to as many of the performances of Jenkins as I possibly can. That is something I always try to do – and I always pay! Partly out of superstition but also because then I'm allowed to have an opinion as the writer – and to sit wherever I like!”

The Judgement of Mr Jenkins is at the Paupers Pit, Buxton, from Thursday until October 11, then at Whitegate Community Centre on October 17 and Bradwell Village Hall on Ocober 18 (both Cheshire). At Studio Salford from November 5-8.