REVIEW: READ THE ROOM at Golden Goose Theatre 4 – 8 June 2024

‘It’s quirky, it’s original, and it’s very well done.’ ★★★

The company present a series of sketches, often having a comic appeal and delighting the audience with surprisingly untrammelled subject matter.   It’s quirky, it’s original, and it’s very well done.  Adding to the invention, there is excellent use of props, including puppetry, along with feel good live music. 

In the programme notes it is explained that the show is based around neurodivergence and queerness which encompasses lived experience.  The use of oversized masks, white and globular with no other features than eyes, means that the characters mime is super important to the piece. The voices come from other actors, the ones with the mics who move among the audience asking them for their names. 

The set up for most of the pieces, is then to get a name from the audience and use this to introduce the next character: ‘This is … (name), they are … (activity)’. It is a clever device to draw everyone in and helps an audience to feel that the masked characters represent everyman or more accurately everywoman. It feels rather child-like being presented as a kind of Storytime, but the tone of the humour is satirical.  The world is made new, as though we are looking at it from a child’s viewpoint and laughing at ourselves.

The company, One. Five Theatre Co, is female-led, made up of an international cast, all graduates from Rose Bruford and East 15 Acting School. They are filling what is certainly a niche for visual storytelling and experimental theatre. With only one man in the cast, it isn’t surprising that many of the sketches relate to the experiences of women, but apart from periods, these often feel universal. Examples are a sketch on ‘love can take your breath away’ which becomes literal. Having a kind of epileptic fit is an experience that here seems a matter for laughter, but not unkindly so.   It’s just another lived experience, different to most, but it happens to some. 

Then, there is the woman who declares that she’s suspicious of small men. This comment is greeted with much laughter from the audience as a tiny male puppet is being manipulated by two puppeteers.   Bizarrely, the puppet is every bit as strident as many men, dropping his cigarette and refusing any help to pick it up. He is trying his best to reach it even though the chair on which he is sitting is just too high, he has no chance.  There is this wonderful sense of irony, and absurdity running through the piece. 

At just under an hour, the impact of the show does start to peter out towards the end, as though the best material is done. There is no story line which is a pity, as it’s crying out to have some sort of through line, a denouement, a satisfactory conclusion of sorts, or keep it open ended (but use something drawn from the show rather than just a song). Potentially, there’s a terrific show here but it needs more quality material and more structure to achieve the phenomenal success that it deserves.

READ THE ROOM at Golden Goose Theatre 4 – 8 June 2024

Box Office https://www.goldengoosetheatre.co.uk/whatson/read-the-room-

Writer/Producer: Clara Janssen & Kat Stidston                                                                         

Director:  Clara Janssen 

Musical Director:  Emily Pacey                                                                                                                       

Lighting: Mass Neri                                                                         

Stage Manager:   Anya Birch

Cast:                                                                             

Nicole Cuthbert                                       

Kat Stidston                                                             

Vilma Paananen                     

Anju Sauter                                 

Ellen Pallant                     

Patrick Burley-Brown     

Reviewed by Heather Jeffery