CityLife

Preview: 24:7 Theatre Festival 2010

Fading Hum

July 26 to August 1

Anyone who’s at all interested in exciting new drama and comedy should already have earmarked the week of July 26-August 1, because those are the seven days of this year’s 24:7 Theatre Festival.

Now in its seventh year, 24:7 has long-since established itself as one of Manchester’s landmark cultural events. Driven by actor David Slack, the festival gives new writing talent the chance to shine and bloom. Every year, playwrights are asked to enter one-hour plays on any subject.

This year, hundreds of entries have been narrowed down to an exciting top 10, with four more plays being given a rehearsed reading. None of them last more than an hour and they’ll all be performed several times over the course of the week at 24:7’s home this year, the Co-operative Society’s New Century House. So there’s really no excuse to miss out.

In strictly alphabetical order, this year’s plays include Paul Osborne’s The Bluest Blue. Directed by Paul Stonehouse, the play involves two strangers who meet on a bench outside York Minster. The woman is looking for fun and the man simply wants to write to his father. Against the odds, he follows up an invitation to visit her home and discovers she has a double identity.

“The idea sprang from my experience of hen parties in York,” says Paul. “There always seems to be one who gets separated from the rest. The play actually began as a 15-minute scene for a script competition, which I decided to develop for 24:7. The whole set-up at 24:7 supports the writer first and foremost, and is a fantastic showcase for local actors and other creative people.” 

The Fading Hum, written by Charlotte Essex and directed by Laura Keefe, explores big concepts such as guilt, death and estrangement. Robin’s unexpected arrival at his brother’s farm coincides with Ted’s bees mysteriously disappearing. Ted calls in the help of Melissa, causing dormant tensions between the brothers to come roaring to the surface.

“Last summer, I read about the mysterious disappearance of the world’s bees,” remembers Charlotte. “Once I had that big idea behind the play, I started thinking about the other characters. I’m really fascinated by sibling relationships and I thought it was an interesting idea if the brothers were estranged and the opening scene is the first time they’ve spoken in years.”

This is Charlotte’s first theatre play, with her previous experience being confined to television, and has already been short-listed for the Nick Darke Award, a prize to help a young writer finish their piece of writing that is related to the environment.

Colette Kane’s Ways To Look At Fish was a big hit at the 2008 24:7, with actress Ruth Evans picking up a Best Fringe Performance gong at that year’s M.E.N Theatre Awards and the play itself being reprised as part of the Bolton Octagon’s Best Of The Fest event. Colette, and director Nick Moss, are back this time around with Hatch, charting the heartbreaking homecoming of an absentee father and his grown-up children.

The Inconsistent Whisper Of Insanity is the latest work from another M.E.N Theatre Award success, playwright/director Ian Moore.

Imagine if you fell asleep at the age of 15 and woke at the age of 76. How far would you be willing to go to find out what happened during those lost years? This play, set in the 1920s during an unsuccessful uprising against the Russian government, asks the question through a fictional account of one young girl’s accidental involvement in the events.

The natural world isn’t always home to pretty flowers and happy birds flying in the sky. Islanders, a dark comedy by Dick Curran, is “a climate-change love triangle set on remote Northumbrian islands.” Warden Peter, an embittered maverick, is nominally managed by his career-minded ex, Ellen. Their stalemate is upset by the arrival of Nicola, a woman who seems completely out of place on the nature reserve.

Make Believe, which is written by Luke Walker and Sally Lawton and directed by Mike Heath, looks at what happens when imagination and real life get mixed up. In a world where fantasy and fact collide, is it time to stop pretending and join the ‘real’ world? After all, it’s only make believe … isn’t it?

“Both myself and Sally had plays in the 2007 Festival,” says Luke. “It was a bit later before we began bumping into each other and watched a few plays together. We got on well and discovered that we were actually born just a few hours apart. Apparently that makes us ‘Astral Twins’, which we are using as the name of our production company for the festival.”

Kim Jackson and Rebecca Mahon’s play No View From The Window turns a decaying WC into a dramatic confessional as Louise, who has returned to her childhood home on the day of her mother’s funeral, looks back on her life, her dysfunctional relationships, and exactly what she hid behind the bathroom panel 25 years ago.

Pawn is a new play from ex-police sergeant Brian Marchbank who put down his truncheon and picked up a pen to start writing at the age of 50.

A robbery at a pawn shop turns into a hostage situation and those involved may share more than a crisis. Good faces up to bad, naïvety meets experience, and love wrestles with hate.

Directed by Dennis Keighron-Foster, Pawn features a cast made up of newcomers to the festival and a few of the regular actors who can’t get enough of 24:7. 

In Reeling, by Sean Gregory, sisters Jude and Alice break into their elderly neighbour’s house only to stumble across a wall of cassette tapes that are recordings of their entire lives. The cast includes M.E.N award winner Ruth Evans, David Cordon (from last year’s Lub You) and 12-year-old local girl Hannah Hughes, while it’s directed by Festival favourite Richard Vergette.

“I attended a workshop where everyone was asked to come up with a frightening idea for a one act play,” says Reeling’s writer Sean Gregory, who also had a 24:7 entry in 2009. “The idea of your neighbour recording your whole life seemed pretty nightmarish to me, and finding the tapes seemed even worse.”

In Sheepish, by Joyce Branagh, A Welshman and a Yorkshireman are dressed as sheep. They wait for Dee in a field, to go to his ‘fancy dress’ party. Another sheep-dressed person turns up. She’s from London and is also meeting Dee. They talk, play, flirt and fight. Then Dee turns up.

There’s got to be something there for every taste, surely. Remember, theatre is the original 3D experience and no special glasses are required!