Nothing quite matches the experience of live theatre: being ’in the room where it happens’, as stories unfold quirkily, sadly or comically and the audience around you responds to them. But theatre doesn’t have to be in the evening, and doesn’t have to be long.
The seventh annual INK festival is romping dramatically through its various Halesworth venues. It's unique as a discoverer, producer and performer of original short plays, 35 of them repeated by a strong company of professional actors through the long weekend, alongside readings and radio dramas.
Most are between five and 15 minutes, grouped in hour-long sessions through the four days of the event.
Audiences choose how to move between sessions, each containing four or five entirely different mini-dramas.
Despite a sprinkling of famous authors - Louis de Bernieres, Kate Mosse, Anthony Horowitz, all happy to have this chance to create a brief firework of a play, and star appearances by David Morrissey and Jan Ravens, the festival’s important drive is to find and display fresh talent and imagination.
So, for new writers, who over months have been submitting scripts, this is a rare and very useful opportunity to see their work directed and performed by professionals.
For audiences it means seeing gifted and versatile actors, under seasoned directors, becoming a series of different characters within each set.
One of its strengths is that because the plays are short we are all likely to give some topic a chance, even if we wouldn’t have sought it out at length.
Something always shakes you into a new perspective, whether it’s on a great global issue or some tiny quirk of human behaviour.
I sneaked into the last rehearsals for the EADT, and found myself watching groups, couples and solos tangled in every level of human situation.
I saw two men very entertainingly winding one another up in a wrestling gym, Joe McArdle and Jack Solloway properly hilarious.
I saw a middle-aged meltdown over champion daffodils at the horticultural show, an online sex worker recognizing why love is something quite different, gazing at a version of herself as a Barbie in a dollshouse, and - surreally and arrestingly - Barbara Horne as an unborn foetus arguing with its father.
Moving to other groups, I have seen two versions of the end of the world, one couple stranded on an iceberg and another bickering shockingly on a rooftop in a flood. I have had to consider whether time is real or a bit of a con, and very touchingly joined two late-night clubbers remembering their less jaded long-ago childhood.
It always gives you jolts of pleasure and insight. Writing alone at home, looking at the world through different eyes, the playwrights offer tiny, sharp takes on universal things - climate change, social confusion and the comedy of embarrassment - but also on small things, neighbourhoods and encounters, and the creativity grown from a sense of our own local history.
One play sees a circus coming to Felixstowe during the 1953 flood, and then in the Halesworth Museum just up the lane you can wander through a fascinating exhibition about that disaster.
I see from other sets of plays - all running now - that there will be a robot, an incident built around a Pritt stick, plenty of couple-trouble, several dog-related situations and indeed one dogfood-related one.
Beyond that the radio dramas and readings take on everything from the problems of pronouns to astronauts bickering over setting foot on planet Mars.
And on Sunday - because every cultural festival should end in a free-for-all - it’s Halesworth Day, with live music in the market square, Punch and Judy and a Halesworth Takes the Stage finale for the kids.
As spring wakes us from our chilly drowse, INK jolts us into life and imagination...
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