CityLife

JB Shorts

JB Shorts
Contact
January 27, 2011

This lively, highly-varied triple bill of three 15-minute plays ends the excellent two-week Re:Play season at Contact - an event, as its title indicates, that has seen repeats of some of the best (local fringe) theatre from the past 12 months.

JB Shorts – taking its title from its home territory in the Joshua Brooks pub just up the road, on Princess Street, city centre - is a pretty big success story in its own write, offering, as it does, no-frills productions of work by some pretty experienced TV hacks punting some of their off-the-piste ideas.

Eastenders’ writer Christopher Reason contributes A Selfish Boy, in which the relationship between a mother who has “never been quite right” (the multi award-winning Eileen O’Brien) and her son (James Quinn) is recalled from his childhood to manhood, culminating in what proves to be their last conversation. Sad and surprising it is the most cohesive and convincing piece of the three.

In Going To Extremes by Lisa Holdsworth (writer for New Tricks, Robin Hood, Waterloo Road and etc), two former workmates, Essex boy Lee (Joe Ransom) and British-born and raised Muslim Amir (Sushil Chudasama) are pitched together on the edge of a protest rally where their heated exchanges run the gamut of us and them prejudices.

Watching The Detectives, by JB Shorts stalwart, actor and writer James Quinn (see also above) is an ambitious, in the time available, comedy satire on TV cop shows, Sunday night ratings, pandering to the no-taste masses and ruthless executives. Patchily amusing, with a couple of highly-topical gags, its cast of six over-play it with gusto.

With the JB Shorts philosophy of having each piece distilled into such a compressed time span, with no intervals, this show has the super-attractive appeal that if you’re not that fascinated by what’s currently in front of you, you don’t need to fret because something else will be along shortly. 

If only all theatre were like that. More of the same please. 
 

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