Oodles of oomph in Pot Noodle
On Saturday 19th March, fourteen young people from Arran High School put on a show called Pot Noodle, written, produced and acted entirely by themselves. The result was astonishing. Pot Noodle boiled over with humour and irreverence and was often deeply touching.
There was a samizdat, unofficial feel about the Saturday night event, staged in front of a smallish audience consisting of parents and the ‘usual suspects’ who turn up to support all creative work on the island. Someone remarked afterwards, to general agreement, ‘Where were the other pupils? They’d have loved it.’ An event packed with such questioning thought and so much zany fun should have played to a packed house. But perhaps the sense of being among a selected few made those present felt privileged to see a production that starred (there is no other word) young actors and writers of such talent.
Heather Gough, in a brief address during the interval, stressed that no adult had been involved in any way with the writing and production, though she and Sarah Cook had been on hand ‘just to make sure it happened.’ The whole idea had initially been part of Arran’s McLellan Festival, though it took some time to come to completion. The Festival had provided the opportunity of attending workshops with a professional director, and there is no doubt that this experience had linked with the young people’s own creative talents and helped towards a standard of extraordinary and justifiable confidence in their own writing and acting.
Pot Noodle consisted of short scenes, skilfully linked by John Baraclough as the guru of sound and light. These cameos added up to an overall picture of fresh, funny thinking, coupled with some very real concerns. Cameron Flewitt in the central part as a kind of lunatic master of ceremonies oversaw these episodes, several of which he had written, with an assured comic talent that had the audience enraptured. Bespectacled and compulsively watchable, his lanky, laconic presence had an easy command that made the watchers feel in safe hands, as did the equally talented Gavin Davidson and Donald McEachern. This trio set up a berserk central core, intelligent, smart, often surreal and completely in command of their material, and they were joined by others with their own form of the same original talent. Katharine O’Donnellly gave a fine performance in her piece called War Dream, in which a distraught girl connects with her lost solider brother, and the ever-touching Christopher Jenks once again showed how skilfully he can deliver the small twist of vulnerable innocence that points up follies and cruelties. Like Katharine, he focussed on war in his piece called Lost In Action, Presumed … Here, well-choreographed troops were firing across a front line, and the mechanism of war proved with brutal clarity that it had no place for the peace-keeping intentions of the innocent.
Everyone in the small company worked magnificently well, with good, assured stage-craft as they shifted from one short sketch to the next, fluent, wry and often very funny. The big laugh of the evening came when one of them asked another in exasperation, ‘You do have the Internet, don’t you?’ to be answered by a shrug and – ‘I live in Pirnmill.’
As well as the stage show, three short films were shown, made by Katharine O’Donnelly, Hamish Finlay and a partnership between Kieran Robertson and John Tilbury. All were fast-moving explorations of daily life, using the camera to point up surreal possibilities. The Robertson/Tilbury film was clever and amusing, and Katharine O’Donnelly showed her usual sensitive response to the common things of life, while Hamish Finlay displayed a very real ability to ‘see through the camera’. Though refraining from any kind of comment, his Exploration of an Attic had poetic perception and left watchers aware of the strangeness and beauty that lie only skin-deep below reality. Altogether, the evening was an extraordinary achievement, and congratulations must go to every member of this talented cast, whose names we list here.
Grant Adamson, Gavin Davidson, Cameron Flewitt, Iona Flewitt, David Heenan, Christopher Jenks, James McAleer, Rose McCormack, Donald McEachern, Katharine O’Donnelly, Connor Reid, Ceila Swinton-Boyle, Patrick Taylor.
(see also School for Show-biz – scroll down.)
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