FULL HOUSE FESTIVAL
REVIEW
Henry Raby, Leeds Student Newspaper.
The Full House Festival was theatre group’s experiment: a set of plays performed in various rooms in an actual house at the start of November. All the plays were so site specific it changes the dimensions of theatre. No comfy seat, just pure intimacy. You don’t watch a world, you exist within it. I wrote ‘The Boss’ for the living room taking influence from Pinter in an attempt to subvert audience expectancy of realism and privacy. TG president Steph De-Whalley devised ‘Purple Sink’ for the kitchen, a physical theatre orientated piece about two lovers, but laced with sinister subtexts. Through futurist concepts of senses in theatre, they cooked actual food to taste and smell for audience interaction. Upstairs you would find Nick Coupe and Grace Wright’s adaptation of Harold Pinter’s ‘Family Voices’ tailored for this small space, turning a language based piece into a close quarters performance. Across the landing was James Bober’s heavily condensed ‘Romeo and Juliet’ telling the story of the doomed lovers in this intimate bedroom environment. When converted into a small room, the plays become so much more direct: scenes of love become so much warmer, scenes of tension become much more gripping. You can literally see the whites of their eyes, actors and audience alike. The logistics of the festival were certainly more complicated than you’d imagine, producer Nick Coupe organising 16 performances over a weekend to accommodate small groups of people. Heaps of praise to the talented actors who crafted four very unique and challenging performances.
