Pint Dreams, a short play devised by the Tin Box Theatre Company is a nostalgic piece of storytelling well worth catching before the end of the Brighton Fringe. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as sitting in a pub with a drink being told a story, and that’s the pure form that Pint Dreams takes. In the 21st century, simplicity is incredibly underrated but Tin Box show that they’ve got enough personality to carry a show from the comfort of an armchair.
Tin Box hit the nail on the head with Pint Dreams, saying so much more about the art of storytelling itself by breaking down barriers just as much as they just tell a good story.
Elena Voce Siriani plays Maggie, who tells the audience a story of her travels about a pub landlady called Edith. Edith was a Romany traveller who settled down when she won a pub in a card game, where she fell in love and then inevitably, lost love, and had to raise the baby left behind on her own. It may be a story that we’ve all heard before in many guises, but Tin Box shine because of their engaging manner of storytelling, incorporating puppetry, music and audience interaction.
Sometimes, I find it all too easy to fall asleep behind the fourth wall if what’s on stage can’t hold my attention. But Siriani has an animated personality with extraordinarily empathetic eyes that an audience can’t help but like; and she manages all this whilst transferring some of her boisterous energy into the deft handling of the puppet used to play Edith. Like all good puppetry, the audience find themselves responding to the puppet over the master as if it were real, and thereby the audience find themselves rooting for Edith. The engagement is focused by the audience being referred to as characters in the story, there was one moment in particular where Edith’s son Isaac locked eyes with a beautiful woman across the room, that was played out with hilarious awkwardness by two audience members. Accompanied by David Gray (impressively) on guitar, harmonica and vocals, Siriani creates the atmosphere of the bard, with an audience sat round a campfire when stories first began to be told (as far as we know), and were passed on by word of mouth.
Tin Box hit the nail on the head with Pint Dreams, saying so much more about the art of storytelling itself by breaking down barriers just as much as they just tell a good story. It’s well worth just half an hour of your time.
