CityLife

A Night on the Tiles

A Night On The Tiles
Contact Theatre
February 5, 2010

LITTLE is what it seems or what you might expect in this debut show from young Manchester-based company Pen-ultimate. Even the title is a pun, as the tiles in question aren’t those of a raucous night out but the plastic letters of Scrabble.

Pen-ultimate describe themselves as a “spoken-word collective”, which in this case means a show packed with wordy wit but laced with sharp physical comedy. 

There are five of them and they met at Contact as part of the theatre’s Young Actors Company. They’ve already been fingered as a group to watch and on the evidence of this inventive, entertaining hour’s-worth, that’s undeniably true.

Gangsta Harry the Hackney hacker (Ali Gadema) decides to stage a Scrabble game with £1.75m prize money and his henchman Scroupier (Niven Ganner) sets about rounding up the other three participants.

Clever

On a trek that takes him across the Himalayas to one of those in-all-the-bars etc and on to the back door of a casino, he finds the world’s expert Scrabblers – Tiler (Ben Mellor), Triple Words (Samira Arhin-Acquaah, aka Lucidity) and Black Slate (Martin Stannage).

Simply staged, with a couple of benches that convert into most of what’s required, plus a couple of projection screens, the action comes fast and often furious.

For cutting edge comedy it’s often comfortably traditional, amounting to a series of sketches, but that’s OK as a high percentage of them are very funny and the whole thing is told in extremely clever rhyming couplets.

Director Montserrat Gili has managed to channel her cast’s energies into a fairly cohesive whole and the result is immensely appealing.

It’s already good but if some enterprising producer decided to take it up and pump money into it to raise the production values and tweak it around, there is undoubtedly enough here to make a commercial box office hit.

Contact Theatre, Oxford Road, Manchester. Until February 13, 2010. Tickets £10 to £6. Box office 0161 274 0600 or www.contact-theatre.org.

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