Sam Waite – Writer & Reviewer

What is the Reboot Festival?

Soon finishing off its fifth year in London, Reboot is London’s biggest short play festival, this year taking places at the Arches Lane Theatre near Battersea Power Station.

Put together by Kibo Productions, each of the festival’s three weeks featured a selection of six short plays, performed back to back with an interval between the third and fourth, totalling at around two hours of new and developing theatre.

Rather than subject plays ranging from a few short minutes to twenty at the most to unfair comparisons to full-scale works and star-rated reviews, I’d like to offer just a few brief thoughts on each of this final week’s shows

This article was written of my own volition with no requests made from the companies involved, following a paid visit on Tuesday, October 7th

Where can I find tickets?

At the time of writing, there are three more evenings left of the festival’s third and final week with tickets available at the link below:

https://www.archeslanetheatre.com/reboot5

oRANGE, by Erin Osgood

Four people arrive one by one at two small tables, whose tablecloths match the scarves worn around the visitors’ necks. The first to arrive, though red-scarfed, opts to sit at the yellow-clothes table, much to the shock of the yellow-scarfed characters and the delight of her red-scarfed companion.

With a fun use of minimal dialogue, each character having only two phrases which change in tone and timbre across repetitions to build a surprisingly strong storyline about rejecting expectations and boundaries. It’s very simple, and often quite silly, but it was a real crowd-pleaser and warmed up the crowd for the evening ahead.

Perhaps not all short plays are suited to later expansion, but as a delightful and surprisingly poignant skit, oRANGE was more effective that I would have thought, and brought to stirring life by its small cast – Malika Jones, Jonas Feind, Maya Biskupsa, and Olivia van Opel – and deceptively precise direction from Chiara Vascotto.

Hello, by Katie Walker-Cook

On one fateful day, two men’s lives have reached agonising lows. Both are unnamed, both live wildly different lives, and yet the two find a kinship though spending much of the day apart. Adam Radford brings a blustering, Henry Lewis-esque quality to his emotionally overwrought journalist, while Ben Hack’s rough-sleeper, wanting only enough change for a hot chocolate on his birthday, drips with both desperation and hopefulness.

Both turn in finely-tuned performances, kept firmly apart by director Ben Anadolu, so as not to lose the power in how similar these two men truly are despite seemingly endless differences. Hack’s character is the more instantly easy to sympathise with, but across the short runtime Walker-Cook pulls back layers, allowing us to see just how close to breaking Radford’s writer truly is.

Where these short plays often show opportunity for expansion and development, what is impressive here is that there is a clear, definitive ending despite it seeming to be a cliff-hanger. Walker-Cook doesn’t need us to know for certain what happens next, because what we now know makes it clear that this fateful moment is the new beginning both men need.

Prove It All Night, by James Wood

It’s a scorching, stickily-hot night, and fifteen-year-old Jesus is literally running away from his fears. It’s the late 1970’s, and he’s snuck his way into a packed gig of a singer he’s never heard of – some guy named Bruce? What comes of the night is not only a newly-found love for Springsteen, but a realisation through the power of music of the man Jesus wants to be.

Sean Landis’ direction does a terrific job of shifting between memories and the gig itself, his command of the stage and Rory Sutherland’s impactful performance selling the tightness of the crowd even in a one-person staging. Perhaps in part because he is the only actor to deliver a full solo piece, Sutherland stood out to me as the strongest performer of the week, and he and Landis seem in perfect unity throughout the piece.

Again, this is a short but complete narrative, and any additions in the future should absolutely flesh out the existing story. The show ends on just the right moment of hope and heartbreak in tandem, and Wood brings Jesus’ story full-circle within his own tight confines.

Signify by Saying ‘I Do’, by Mark Loewenstern

It’s that most classic of stories: Boy meets girl, boy and girl don’t work out, girl marries someone else down the line, boy has hopelessly pined for girl the entire time. This time Dex is a playwright, and Riley is his ex, best friend, muse, and pseudo-leading-lady. As he reminisces on what could have been, he rebreaks his own heart time and time again by re-casting her role and re-imagining all the ways this scene could play out.

Carefully directed by Amalia Kontesi, this rapidly becomes a complex play-within-a-play, perhaps within another play or two, and as we learn who these characters are we also get to see who Dex wants them to be. As Loewenstern pulls away these layers and lays a failed romance bare, Kontesi keeps a firm balance on the mix of breeziness and tragedy that permeates the piece.

Rowland Sterling and Lily Blunsom-Washbrook make for a winning pair, and she does a fine job of fading into simply a character he is imagining as he becomes more and more openly scrambling for meaning in it all. While there is funny to be found, this is Sketch Tragedy at play, a brief look into two lives that never quite came together, and is a great example of a short play that works wonderfully as is, open to expansion but totally complete in this form.

Subterrane, by Brian C. Petti

Two young women, one more adventurous and the other more driven by her anxiety, descend into a nearby cave to explore what so few have seen. Except that one of them seems much more at home down here, and the other feels increasingly frustrated as things she sees, things she knows are happening, are continuously brushed aside.

Reminding me of the countless short horror films on YouTube (this is not an insult, I’ve found some absolute gems on there!), this piece plays with our sense of truth. Is she imagining things and the bickering over directions is flaring up long-buried tensions, or is something more sinister, even supernatural at play? Directed by Sarah Jost, the play doesn’t seem to mind what we decide, but is thoroughly bent on unsettling us.

As Emma Alys Henderson’s performance becomes more frightening, less human in a strikingly sinister way, Emily Brown’s becomes more hysterical, less even-keeled. Whether you find yourself creeped out by Henderson or irritated with Brown’s lack of adventurous spirit, Jost keeps the pair firmly at odds, and the effect is a brief piece of horror which forces you to not just face fears, but create them for yourself.

The Turnip Cruncher, by Nick Sean Joubert

Rounding out the week’s plays, this examination of a slightly-out-there family proves to also be the most traditional play of the bunch. A pub landlady has come to knock on the door of a father and daughter living in a scattershot, unkempt home – well, if there was a front door on the hinges, anyway. After a rowdy night out, the titular relic has vanished from the pub walls, and the younger woman is accused of the theft.

Dad jumps to her defence, but what else could possibly fill the next episode of her web-series on old and fascinating trinkets than a turnip cruncher? Back-and-forths ensue over ownership, acceptance of gifts, and eventually over a broken marriage soon to come back together. Under the assured guidance of Claire-Monique Martin, this is the proto-typical family drama on a minute scale, and the whole thing is quite charming, really

With a winningly scattered dad in the form of Mark Keegan, a stern-because-she-has-to-be turn from Jodyanne Richardson, and a performance from Charlotte Touboulic that carefully walks the line between a bit quirky and quite weird, this is a nice little visit to this country pile, and a surprisingly effective way to end a delightful evening at the theatre.

I felt invigorated by the Reboot Festival, and am still kicking myself for hearing about it too late to visit either of the previous weeks. With some work I’d love to see further developed and some artists who I’ve come away a firm fan of, this is a beautiful reminder of why I love fringe theatre, and of the need for new and unique voices to be heard both on and off-stage.