It is amazing what a coffee and a croissant can do to a bleary-eyed
audience. The collective hangover which overcasts every morning of the festival
vanished for the crowd of
The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show is the perfect way to kickstart your day.
Every morning the show offers up one of three ‘menus’ for the delectation of its early-bird theatre enthusiasts. Each ‘menu’ contains an entirely different selection of pieces, so the daily rotation means you could - in theory - enjoy the show three times should you feel so inclined. Based on the quality of writing and performance in ‘Menu One’, I think many will.
The first of the plays, Intertwining Monologues by Steven Hopley, jolted everyone awake with its relentless and spot-on take down of the pretentious monologue. The comedic assault continued with I Thought I Liked Girls by Nicole Pandolfo which takes the idea of coming out to your family and inverts it to point out how ridiculous it is that this is something society still requires us to do.
The first little stumble of the show came with Violin by Jonathan Kravetz, which has a killer concept - a down on his luck violinist substitutes the voice in his head for a talking hand - but doesn’t have any real development. Similarly, Candy Likes Your Status by Matt Henderson tackles online communication and millennial fear in an intelligent way, but the jokes wear thin as the play goes on.
The highlight of the show was certainly Bursting by Lisa Holdsworth, in which a chance encounter in M&S between a woman desperate for the loo and a perverted gas fitter becomes a scorchingly funny meditation on sex and contentment in modern relationships. By this point, the ensemble cast have proven incredible versatility, having faultlessly ripped through an eclectic mix of work. This cannot be seen more clearly than in the final piece A Great War which pits the cast as newscasters, flapper girls and perplexed soldiers in the highlight reel of a company’s World War I broadcasts.
The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show is the perfect way to kickstart your day. Not only does its savvy showcase fuel you up, it also gets you in gear to appreciate the dynamic and interesting work you’ll inevitably watch throughout day. This might just be the coffee talking, but that’s one hell of a tempting combination.
