Articles by Penny Jayne

...and this is my friend Mr Laurel

...and this is my friend Mr Laurel

Jeffrey Holland stars in this one-man show about friendship, memories and a couple of remarkable lives. Playing Stan Laurel, on a final visit to Oliver Hardy’s convalescent bedside, he effortlessly conveys the closeness and tenderness of their relationship - calling Hardy ‘babe’ throughout (it was Hardy’s real nick-name, but it's still heart-breakingly sweet)... 

Wrapped in The Sun

Wrapped in The Sun

Wrapped in the Sun is a nice little debut from writer Cleo Harrington, who has a certain gift for comedy. Centering around Lucinda, a failed artist reduced to teaching crafts on a council estate, the action takes place entirely in one room of a community centre, with only Lucinda, a mannequin to which she is far too attached and a grumpy northern janitor punctuating her wait for students... 

Bare

Bare

'Bare' features one of the most visually arresting opening sequences I’ve seen in a while. The stage is covered in red satin in the middle of which a woman named only as Susie sits hunched, back to the audience, looking like someone’s dumped a body... 

Laughter on the Brain

Laughter on the Brain

Billed as ‘Comedy show meets science experiment’, I was pretty excited about Laughter on The Brain. A shame then that, despite having the word ‘laughter’ in the title, this is an obnoxiously dull hour... 

Hamlet

Hamlet

‘More matter, less art’ says Gertrude to Polonius (both sensitively performed here by Terry Diab and Richard Ings respectively) – Get to the point! Not an approach that should work with Hamlet – we think we need the ‘art’, the soul-searching, the ‘Alas Poor Yorick’... 

Occupied

Occupied

I like Amy Wright. She’s cute, self-deprecating and instantly loveable. Unfortunately, she’s just not that funny. Occupied purports to be a show about what Wright has been doing in the three years since she quit her job – ‘occupying herself with poetry, songs, and props’, and paying a little too much attention to her nephew Cameron it seems, though this does result in a brilliant visual gag when she fields him as an alternative to our current Prime Minister... 

Raising Lazarus

Raising Lazarus

Kat Francois has just discovered she’s a distant relative of Lazarus Francois, who served with the British West Indian regiment in World War 1. However, despite a trip to Granada, she frustratingly fails to find out much more about him... 

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