This show finished on Thursday 09 March 2017, and this page is being kept for archival purposes only.

Me, As A Penguin

"I'm sorry, but there's a baby penguin in our bathroom."

Dates

Wednesday 08 March - Thursday 09 March 2017

Venue

Bedlam Theatre

Price

£5.50/5/4.50

Author

Tom Wells

Description

A charmingly offbeat, surreal comedy of knitting, penguins and Battenberg.

Stitch is hitting the gay scene of Hull. Or at least dipping his toe in the water, while staying with his heavily pregnant sister Liz and her shabby sofa-loving partner Mark. But why won’t Stitch let anyone into the bathroom even though Liz is dying for a pee? And who is the man in the giant penguin costume?

Stitch - Oliver Beaumont

Liz - Sally MacAllister

Dave - Tom Whiston

Mark - Rufus Love

Cast and Crew

Team

Assistant Director Francesca Sellors

Assistant Producer Lorna Welsh

Assistant Technician Amy Hart

Director Matthew Sedman

Producer Georgie Rodgers

Production Designer Caitlin Allen

Stage Manager Jane Prinsley

Technical Manager Rui Zhang

Review for Me, As A Penguin -

Thursday 09 March - By Alan Brown for Edinburgh49

This is a real Buy Now goodie. There’s cake, Bowie’s Heroes, Hull, aka.UK City of Culture 2017, and top-shelf performance. All, or thereabouts, satisfying and delightful.

Tom Wells’ play is eight years old now but doesn’t have a sell-by date, and certainly not for a student audience. For a start, most (boys) feel guilty about not knowing how to knit and there’s something unquantifiable, way beyond The Complete University Guide, about tasty bites of Battenberg for tea on an old but wonderfully comfortable sofa. Caitlin Allen’s set and costumes are a treat by themselves.

Not that anyone’s at Uni’ in this play, although a few ‘soft’ (ie. valuable) GCSEs like Textiles are shared around. Liz (22-23?) is going to have a baby very, very soon, and can’t wait to be a young mum in ASDA with baby sick in the pocket of her jeans. Mark, dad-to-be and nice bloke, used to work at IKEA where sofas just reproduce. His mate Dave – a ‘complete twat’, in Liz’s honest opinion – is a keeper at Hull’s old aquarium, before it became spectacular as ‘The Deep’. And then there’s Stitch, Liz’s kid brother, a ‘yearning not belonging’ kind of guy who has a sad thing for Dave but who is happier knitting snoods and eating yoghurt. When Me, As A Penguin begins Stitch has come back with a new friend, whom he has stashed behind the shower curtain.

Liz probably shouldn’t be at the heart of the play – that’s more likely to be Stitch’s lovable anguish – but Sally MacAllister and her bump are terrific. It’s comic but tender and never more so than during a fabulous dance routine with Stitch and the later, faster, exit for the maternity unit when Mark tries to pack the hospital bag. Forget birth plan or dressing gown, think more potted plant.

Oliver Beaumont is Stitch, gay, gangling and woebegone. He has almost given up on the city. Withernsea and home, 17 miles away, is a kinder place. Forlorn rather than pathetic works for him and results in a near miss with tragedy that sidesteps the absurd. It’s Stitch’s relationship with Dave (Tom Whiston) that’s difficult to realise. The script for the two of them is unforgiving and explicit and especially tough to realise from inside a giant penguin suit.

Tom Wells, the writer, has a degree in English. At a guess, he’s read Cowper’s The Sofa , a hymn to IKEA from 1794, with its immortal opening, I sing the Sofa (!)– that takes aim at the upholstered and the artificial. Me, As A Penguin is in the same virtuous, giving, vein and this production, directed by Matthew Sedman, is really worth seeing.

Gallery

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