Helen has received a great review in the local paper and it feels really terrific to receive support like this:
Charlotte Lowey as on of the Helens
THIS is Greek tragedy for sure, but it’s more up-beat than others you can name. It’s eighty minutes without an interval but they never drag.
The protagonist Helen of Troy, re-surfaced in Egypt, is a victim of her own beauty, as were all those recently perished in a Trojan War which it turns out was futile - we are all playthings of arbitrary and capricious gods. But it is, as well, a love story with an essentially happy resolution.
Director, Cynthia Marsh, gives us an inventive studio production. Helen is played in turn by five performers, each of whom takes it in turns to don a single mask. Except, that is, right at the start, when Helen appears naturalistically but everyone else wears his/her own individualised but unrealistically grotesque mask.
Amanda Hodgson (Theonoe), Matthew Swan (Menelaos) and Chris Roberts, as a Messenger, give particularly pleasing performances: they deliver their lines with clarity, understanding and conviction.
Initial dialogue in each scene is done in Ancient Greek; elsewhere it’s a vigorous translation, much of which rhymes, sometimes deliberately comically.
After two and a half millennia this play raises contemporary concerns about pointless war-making and the distinction between private person and public persona.
ALAN GEARY (Source: Nottingham Evening Post)
For me an outcome of Helen is that our director identified a couple of areas that I could do with developing which is a prospect I find very exciting. She suggested investigating different types of movement and working on the modulation of my voice. The movement issue this has been something I have wanted to look at for some time and I think now might be the time to get studying. In regards to the issue of vocal modulation, in everyday conversation I can move my voice all over the place, but when projecting in order for an audience to hear me properly I have to pitch it at a specific tone. Manipulating my voice within this register has proved difficult. Cynthia also pointed out that I had got into the bad habit of not breathing correctly which is something I initally prided myself on and has obviously gone a bit lax recently.
As ever acting is a continual learning process and that is what is so thoroughly brilliant about it.
