Reviews
A few reviews of the individuals in the company
The Night Before Christmas
"Jonathan Race is totally convincing as the dad trying to get his daughter to sleep on Christmas Eve and is good value as the toy whose batteries keep failing..."
Susan Elkin - The Stage
Not About Heroes
"Owen is played by Jonathan Race in a most impressive and profoundly moving performance. There are no histrionics, just a very deep level of emotion and sincerity."
Lesley McEwen - Newbury Chronicle
Augustus Carp, By Himself
"Already Jonathan Race's portly Carp is a comic joy of over indulgence and indigestion well able to take centre stage and hold it."
Steve Pratt - Northern Echo
"The mixture of shameless self-preservation, bemusement, and the sheer capacity to gloat are all summoned brilliantly in the performance and face of Jonathan Race as Augustus Carp. The play is almost an autobiographical soliloquy. If it was performed by this actor alone it would still be funny."
BBC North Yorkshire stage
"Jonathan Race is wonderful as Carp…his face has a Rowan-Atkinson-like mobility, and his utter lack of self-knowledge is entirely convincing."
Mark Woods - Baptist Times
Female Parts
"Gail Kemp was quite brilliant in all three pieces.
"This was a remarkable performance, not least because it was so intense and demanding for the actress. Although she was on stage for about an hour-and-a-half, the pace and sheer physicality never faltered. She was funny, moving and powerful in turn, displaying passion and compassion, and maintained a mesmerising contact with the audience... Miss Kemp's huge talent made this a superb, unforgettable evening."
Newbury Weekly News
The Gruffalo
"...However the outstanding performer in this show is Jonathan Race…His comic timing is superb, raising a few laughs from the adult contingent on more than one occasion. All this with a superb singing voice and energy by the bucketload!"
John Cuthbertson UK Theatre Network
Mistero Buffo
"The comedy is balanced by pathos, the latter in the hands of Vicki Hackett, who gives a towering performance."
The Stage
Pilots and Navigators
"Dunn was the last new poet published by Oxford University Press before their commercial decision to axe contemporary poetry altogether.
"Thankfully, Carcanet have picked up this collection, a confident and stylish book by so young a writer. Formally, one could not find fault in these polished stanzas, and Dunn displays an instinctive sense of line and subtlety of rhythm. The title conjures up expectations of a different book, but travel features often, whether touring with actors, ferry trips to Brugge or Dublin, cars in driving rain, or an ancestor's (perhaps apocryphal) voyage to England with his own 'secret Scyllas and Sirens / with which to contend'.
"The touring actors appear in various poems, but in 'Bournemouth' Dunn looks beyond the artifice to 'the unreeled sand where its own, its true story / is played out quietly by a cast of dumb extras'
"Friendships, adventure and fledging relationships are set against questions of identity and delight in experience. Pilots and Navigators is an accomplished debut from a poet we're sure to hear more from."
Bloomsbury Magazine
"An often unique voice... subtle, thought-provoking and enormously readable."
Poetry Review
Flying Fish
"Dunn's considerable talent... rewards the reader with epiphanies, annunciations of light, poems refreshingly affirmative."
Dannie Abse
"An alert, intelligent book... poems which, Brodsky-like, take the reader somewhere new, jinking round the corners of places we think we know into imagined elsewheres... there's much to admire."
Poetry Wales