The Band Back Together at Arcola Theatre

I do not get to Arcola Theatre in Dalston as much as I did when I worked within walking distance but it is still something of a favourite and I welcome any reasonable excuse to go there. The very reasonable excuse this time was a new play by Barney Norris. My first exposure to his work was also at Arcola, Visitors in 2014, and since then I have seen productions of his at Bush and Bridge theatres as well as Arcola again.

It was very early in the run and my preview ticket for front row seat A11 was just £20. 

Dalston may be gentrifying but my pre-theatre eating operations have reduced over the years, e.g. I had been to Farr's before and their website was promising but on that night they were not doing food. Not for the first time I was forced into The Speakeasy, a semi-outdoor space, where the food and beer did the job nicely. It is really time that I started thinking of this place as a proper option for eating rather than a fall-back.

The play was downstairs in Studio 2 which has a nice cosy feel in which the front row seat added to the intimacy.

The simple premise behind the play was that three people who had been in a band eighteen years ago (half their lives) were coming back for a once-off performance having had no contact in the meantime. 

The eighteen years of catch-up provided a lot of rich material. They had parted as little more than children and had become adults in the meantime with adult jobs and adult families. Their experiences had been mixed and there were both light and dark stories.

It was a touching story of three people leading three separate lives each with their own joys and frustrations. The way those stories were told was intelligent which kept me engaged and natural so it felt real. That realness helped to hide the clever things going on in the script, which only reinforced its cleverness.

The play was set in their rehearsal sessions and we got a reasonable amount of music which was a bit punky and interesting lyrically and musically. It was a far step from the standard fare delivered by most musicals. I liked it.

Barney Norris was there to see how things went and it was good to be able to share a few words about this and his other shows. The chance to speak to a creative is one of the joys of smaller theatres.

The Band Back Together was my sort of play in my sort of theatre. A wonderful evening!