Photo credit www.carolinehorton.net

A busy day of theatre at Warwick Arts Centre (it’s at the University – you should really go). The centre was bursting with people due to the concurrently running TEDx conference and Bite Size theatre festival. I could have gone to either, but had tickets to Bite Sized so I went to that one. And just as well, because I certainly wouldn’t have got the chance to unexpectedly take the stage at TEDx as I did thanks to that cheeky Tom Wainwright. Tom’s show was on the quirky side, and demanded the audience to pay close attention as he tried to be truthful and play himself, alongside his co-conspirator Sam, but also to put on a wig and play John, who is dying of something (what? no, it doesn’t matter to the plot).

There were a series of brief (oh, too brief) extracts of Only A Paper Moon by Little Earthquake. I blogged about this show before when it was on First Bite (in fact, I haven’t blogged about much else since – it’s still on the first page even though the post was back in September.) Gareth and Phil have polished the performances of the four separate stories and dropped a few of the weaker experiments from the previous show. It is really shaping up, and I look forward to seeing how the disparate stories and characters with their lunar obsessions intersect in future work in progress showings.

Caroline Horton is a compelling performer and her new show is about anorexia nervosa. There wasn’t much in the way of plot in the short extract, but the promise of enormous duvet covers sounds, um, interesting. Katie says it’s a pastiche of an earnest issue-based theatre piece. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Our Fathers by Babakas was a curious mix of storytelling, audience interaction and dance. It was a very person piece with some touching moments. Instead of dealing with “issues” it drew from the relationships between the artists and their fathers.