February 2010

Lesson Objective

RedTIE Students devised piece (9-13 year olds)

SATS, reading age levels, tests, achievements, aims etc etc. The audience were given an insight into how young people feel about the pressures of the modern education system, the attitudes of their parents and carers towards academic “results” and revelations about what makes your kids feel valued and happy.

Unclaimed Baggage

RedTIE Students devised piece (13-19 year olds)

The war against terror – the threat of the unknown fanatic in our midst. Satire, farce and poignant moments in this tale of the modern world will make you laugh, recoil in disgust and, most importantly...make you think.

Cul-de-sac Theatre continues its celebration of modern classics - previous productions include Beckett's Endgame (Best Drama, Buxton Festival), a production which caught the playwright's black humour perfectly. Like Beckett, Dario

Summer Schools

Yet again, the Summer Schools were a great success with both age groups performing at the end of their week of drama training.

The younger group (8-12 yrs) spent their week learning performance, ensemble and devising theatre techniques, performing a piece about “image and the media” for parents and friends after 5 days of working together.

The older group (13-18 yrs) were coached in the performance styles of Brecht, Stanislavski and Artaud, using naturalism, political theatre and symbolism to devise and perform a piece that took the audience on a journey from birth and innocence to cynicism and death.

Both groups were very creative and mature in their approach – a good team spirit was created from the very first day which enabled the students to work well together and produce some excellent pieces of work – some of which were used for performance.

For details about holiday workshops contact redtietheatre@hotmail.co.uk.

Plays and Performances

Show brought tears to eyes  By Sue Lupton - Friday, September 18, 2009    

EXTRAORDINARY Island talent was on show at Quay Arts’ Anthony Minghella Theatre last week. RedTIE Theatre’s performance of The Long Road was a powerful, harrowing piece of drama that brought tears to the eyes of more than one member of the audience.

Shelagh Stephenson’s script deals with a family’s grief following the fatal stabbing of 18-year-old Danny. The director was Joe Plumb, one of several brilliant youngsters involved in the performance. The RedTIE group runs workshops for young people, encouraging creativity and self-expression through drama. With its productions, it aims to raise awareness of social issues.

One of the organisations backed by RedTIE is Help2Grieve, a new group to help bereaved children and families.

With knife crime constantly in the news, The Long Road takes a long, hard look at how it affects those left behind.

Helen Reading, RedTIE group leader, was utterly convincing as Mary, Danny’s devastated mother, who is driven to try and understand why her son was killed by a young stranger. Her real-life husband, Steve, gave an equally strong performance as Danny’s father, John, who tries to deal with the loss by running and drinking. Danny’s brother, Joe, was played by Henry Vince, a former Carisbrooke High student, now studying drama at Exeter University. He had witnessed the murder, which he recounted in an incredibly moving monologue at the opening of the play.

The killer, Emma, a damaged, drug-taking teenager, had stabbed Danny late at night, when he refused to give her money. Superbly portrayed by Katy Rawlinson, a Carisbrooke High student, Emma is cocky, gobby, foul-mouthed and slightly pathetic. A prison therapist, Elizabeth (Maria Wilkinson), arranged for Mary to visit Emma in prison and, though her first visit was a disaster, a turning point came when Emma admitted she did not mean to kill Danny and she did not read Mary’s letters because she was illiterate. Although Mary and Joe cannot forgive her, they start teaching her to read. By the end, the family is on its way to recovery and Emma is starting to turn her life around.  

• Help 2 Grieve - Island bereavement service for young lives.

Fast-paced and funny By Louise McCully - Friday, August 7, 2009  

THREE bedrooms unsurprisingly set the scene for Alan Ayckbourn’s 1970s comedy, Bedroom Farce, performed by The Red TIE Theatre Company.

The fast-paced comedy, directed by Steve Reading,  assisted by Joseph Plumb, was set in three separate bedrooms onstage, exploring the lives of four couples and how their intertwined lives converge and collide in their chaotic bedrooms.

From eating sardines on toast, hiding from party guests or convalescing, the use of the bedroom is explored in ways you wouldn’t expect. However, you would not find yourself nodding in agreement more than once.

Whether you relate to the conventional elderly couple, love’s young dream, or just having to put up with the neurotic nightmare couple that keep invading your privacy, you’ll never look at your bedroom in the same light again.

Quay Arts had an almost full house, who laughed incessantly at the talented cast of four couples, who were all having issues in their relationships, focusing on the disastrous duo, Susannah and Trevor, played by Alison Kent and Phil Burland. Alison Kent, who had perfect comic timing, had the audience in stitches with her lively bungling performance as the misguided Susannah.

Equally compelling in his acting debut was Matt Coles, as the bedbound Nick. With his sarcastic Basil Fawltyesque melancholy, Matt had the audience in the palm of his hand with the slightest change in facial expressions, caused by Nick’s "wrecked back" and exacerbations with other characters, namely his poor suffering wife Jan, played by Helen Reading.

The Red TIE Theatre Company, perhaps best known for issue-based theatre on social topics, showed they are able to equally excel in light-hearted comedy.

A thought-provoking double By Emily Pearce - Thursday, May 14, 2009  

TENSION and menace were the order of the day at REDtie Theatre’s latest Quay Arts show, a double bill comprising Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter and Shelagh Stephenson’s Five Kinds of Silence.

Directed by Marylyn Ford and starring Steve Reading and Colin Ford, The Dumb Waiter follows two hit-men, the jaded Ben and his younger partner, Gus, as they wait in a dingy room for their next job, without even a cup of tea.

As the time passes with no word from their boss, and mysterious food orders continue to arrive from a dumb waiter at the back of the room, the sense of agitation and repressed violence grows and grows.

Both actors were excellent, successfully conveying the play’s sense of unease and delivering the blackly comic script with flair.

The second play, Five Kinds of Silence, dealt with a different kind of menace altogether, that of domestic violence.

Directed by 18-year-old Joseph Plumb, this harrowing and intense production saw Rod Jones star as Billy, a twisted, terrifying character full of rage and bile. He thrives on the fear of his abused wife, played by Maggie Cardew, and damaged adult daughters, played by Helen Reading and Terrie Burland, making this a difficult play to watch.

The cast were superb, offering a devastating glimpse into the complex nature of domestic abuse. The play is about terror and suffering, certainly, but it is also about embarrassment, shame and secrecy.

REDtie has a reputation for tackling challenging, issue-based plays and this production had a serious point to make about domestic abuse — the title refers to the silence of the four family members but also to that of the outside world.

Spell-binding, unforgettable entertainment By Sue Lupton - Friday, January 23, 2009

THE audience at Quay Arts on Wednesday last week enjoyed an unforgettable evening’s entertainment by RedTIE Theatre.

Not only was the play, The Filibuster, a spell-binding drama, but the cast of three included a brilliant understudy who had stepped in just a few days earlier.

The Filibuster, by Island playwright Hazel Wyld, features a middle-aged couple at a crossroads in their marriage after their 30-year-old Downs Syndrome daughter has gone to live in a home.

Hazel Wyld has raised a child with learning difficulties, which perhaps explains why the play was exceptionally poignant.

The friend who accompanied me works with people with special needs. She confirmed that the issues raised — guilt over placing an adult child in a home, loneliness after they have left and anxiety about the parent dying before the child, to name a few — were totally true to life.

Personal experience might also have enhanced the stunning performance by Helen Reading, who played the wife, Sybil. Helen has a brother, Darren, who has Downs Syndrome and works at Haylands Farm. The production raised money for Haylands Farm.

Sybil’s husband, John, was played by Steve Reading, Helen’s husband. The part was to have been played by Kevin Mitchell, who is battling cancer and was in hospital.

John English, Kevin’s partner, and Steve were directors of the production and when they heard Kevin could not be there, Steve stepped into the breach.

His performance was remarkably fluent: although he used a script, after the first few minutes, it was barely noticeable. The play was mainly dialogue, punctuated by monologues, so Steve’s performance was no mean feat.

There was plenty of passion in the plot. When one of John’s former lovers, the glamorous Belinda, played by Rebecca Brough, visited, we learned he had had a series of affairs throughout their marriage.

Sybil was overwhelmed by feelings of loss over her daughter’s leaving and resentment towards John. The big question is: Will their marriage survive?

I shall not give away the answer, because if Red Tie Theatre stage The Filibuster again (they put it on once before, in September 2008, also at Quay Arts), I would urge you to see it.