Articles by Charley Ville

Movin' Melvin Brown presents 'Me and Otis'

“Remember this”, quoth Movin’ Melvin Brown, winding up his 80-minute set with just a couple more trademark 33 1/3 rpm chuckles, ‘it’s nice to be important.’ More chuckles, a kilowatt grin: ‘but it’s important to be nice!’...

Fannytasticals

Review
★★★★
Brighton Fringe
Sweet Dukebox
13th May, 2017

A bejazzled clunge? A muff, minge, vadge, landing strip or front bottom? Ah, it’s just too much fun delving in the dirty dictionary of lady slang but that’s probably enough for now...

Something Rotten

Something Rotten, not to be confused with the 2015 Broadway musical of the same name, is this time Hamlet’s villainous uncle, Claudius’s version of events, told as if he were briefing the audience- his newly formed privy council...

Cathedral

Cathedral is a midnight mass - an ode to memory and the sense of loss which carefully evokes a frozen, car-crash, state of mind. Two actualities run in tandem. A voice-over, male then female, piles up pieces of narrative that form imperfect recollections of a relationship into an overlapping collection...

Big Bobby, Little Bobby

If like me you find an Irish accent a wondrous tool capable, in a single crank, of spinning the very stars in the gutter, and if, like me also, you enjoy nothing better than a bit of virtuoso story-telling, then you’re going to love Big Bobby, Little Bobby...

A Glass of Nothing

Stand and hat, dressing table and mirror, decanter and glass: is this the archetypal room-on-a-stage? Emphatically, yes. And the actress waiting to play, dowdily bathrobed, preening and pecking her smart phone, is she a modern mix of Blanche Dubois and Bridget Jones? Yes again...

Insomnia

Review
★
Brighton Fringe
The Brunswick
12th May, 2016

It’s said that two fasting, sleepless nights are all that separates us from savagery. And the play I saw last night, Insomnia, devised by ZLS Theatre, is well endowed with the kaleidoscopic disorientation, claustrophobia and the downright maddening of such an eventuality...

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Newly single and HIV positive Pete listens to the consolations of his best friend Vanessa on his voicemail. “Call me!” she almost begs. He flicks on to Grindr. - Ping - “What you into?” - Ping - “BB and chems” - Ping - “Sounds fun...

Twelfth Night

Review
★★
Brighton
The Old Market
14th Apr, 2016

There’s a storm. Noble identical twins are separated and cast away in an enemy realm. Thus begins Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s best known and most performed comedy. What follows is the classical version of chaos, as genders are bent, hierarchies inverted and falsehoods embraced...

Now I'm A Big Boy!

Review
★★
Brighton
Sweet Dukebox
11th Apr, 2016

If you believe ‘youth is wasted on the young’, then just for a second imagine it was lived by the not-so-young. Dorian Gray doesn’t cover it. We are thankful then, for sixth-former Sam Cartwright and his crew’s freshly written and produced play Now I’m a Big Boy!, which, despite its flaws, never rids us of the conviction that the people in the picture here are not doing so badly at all...

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