CHESS on tour

 I have been wating a long time to see a professional production of Chess and I was not disappointed! This show is trully fab-u-lous darling ... stunning.

I have always been a fan of The Watermill's player-actor approach, it has always led to high energy, high quality productions pretty well all of which end up in my "most fav" list. Here we see the same technique taken up a notch, a trully talented group of actors playing, singing, dancing and acting their way through this piece, smoothing out the patchy bits (sorry, I just do not get The Arbiter!) and giving their all. You really have to see this twice as there is just so much to look at ... at one point all the action and lighting was center stage but look in the upstage left corner and there was some fabulous off-line acting going on ...

This trully is an ensemble piece of the highest order and the whole is created by all of the parts, large and small. It is almost disingenuous to pick out individuals but I'm going to anyway; Shone White for her fabulous performance, Ben Cracknell for a superb lighting plot and the pawn cellists (sorry, can't work out who you are from the programme) ...

What was so refreshing was to see so much talent in one place giving voice to an under-exposed musical ... actually, it really is quite unfair that some people have so much talent ... watch out for the moment when the pawn trumpeter, whilst acting her socks off, playing the trumpet and moving as part of a co-ordinated crfowd, starts using the mini-cam on the end of her instrument to provide a live feed to the video screen ... without missing a beat or a close-up ....

This is good. This is very good .... thank you