Alarms and Excursions at the Warehouse Theatre, Ilminster (From Chard & Ilminster News)

Alarms and Excursions at the Warehouse Theatre, Ilminster

2:00pm Wednesday 22nd February 2012 in News

THE next production at the Warehouse Theatre in Ilminster will be Michael Frayn’s Alarms and Excursions – a collection of eight small plays which were originally written for four performers.

While staging the plays with just four people would certainly present an enjoyable challenge, the Ilminster Entertainments Society has decided to use a larger cast of nine players in order to speed up the process of directing the plays and to reduce the number of lines each individual has to learn in a short timeframe.

Michael Frayn is a versatile writer with several serious novels and plays to his name, but he is perhaps best known in theatre circles for his farce Noises Off.

Alarms and Excursions is much more in the tradition of the latter with eight comic plays about the problems of communication and the dangers of relying on modern technology.

The opening piece, Alarms, sets the tone as a dinner party descends into chaos thanks to an ever increasing cacaphony of sounds from the fire alarm, oven, car alarm and so on.

Doubles is set in two adjoining hotel rooms occupied by two very similar couples, each of whom seem to have very similar concerns and preoccupations.

This is a complex piece for the performers, but great fun for the audience as the activities in each room seem almost to be mirror images of each other with inevitably awkward consequences.

In Act Two, the pace picks up with a couple of largely visual sketches, Toasters and Look Away Now, set at a company conference and aircraft respectively.

Though there are no lines to be learned here, there’s plenty to do and much physical comedy.

Glassnost is all about the words, as a speaker places too much reliance on their teleprompter, and Leavings returns us to the party of Alarms once the chaos has died down.

The whole package is wrapped up by Immobiles, set in the dim and distant past before mobile phones, and when answerphones were the only way of getting in touch with people when they were out.

Alarms and Excursions is being directed by Brian Hallett and runs at the Warehouse through to Friday, February 24.

Tickets are priced £7.50 with £7 for concessions and £4 for students, and are available from Lanes Garden Shop in Ilminster between 10am and 4pm on Monday to Saturday, or from the Warehouse box office on 07943-779880.