I managed to get to the theatre one more time before the hammer came down and everywhere closed. It was at the excellent Live Theatre’s Elevator Festival which offers a platform for new work. I was lucky enough to see solo shows Last Seen Bensham Road and Redcoat, which were presented as a double bill.
Last Seen Bensham Road, written and performed by Samantha Neale, tells Tanya's story of a struggling single mother who considers herself inadequate as a parent. She explores themes of being without money and unable to calm her screaming son. There are other mums at her son's school who are better off and Tanya wants to hide away from their stares and judgements. She wishes she could just disappear until one day, she literally does.
Then there was Redcoat a partially autobiographical piece, recounting writer and performer Lewis Jobson’s experiences working as a Redcoat entertainer in Bognor Regis "Once a Red, always a Red."
He bursts onto the stage and radiates kilowatts of energy and charm as he indulges the audience in a day in the life of a Redcoat.
Sparse staging gives Lewis more room to perform, and we get some real Redcoat crowd-pleasing mixed in with the life backstage. I thought it was a tour-de-force, blending physical comedy, sketches, singing, dancing and -er- balloon modelling, all performed with fun and a kind of cheeky craziness.
There's almost too many 'That bit's' in it...That bit where the audience fills in on the Karaoke...That bit where Pingu turns up at the night club...That bit where he has to describe and mimic each of his co-singers...and so on.
Lewis shows the other side of the life, too, with comments about having a smile permanently welded to his face, the hangovers from the nights out/days off and the gentler moments as he entertains the smaller guests.
Amazing.
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