Review: Act II Festival, Hounslow Arts Centre

Review: Act II Festival, Hounslow Arts Centre

Summary

Rating

80

Excellent

Thirteen shows that, whilst varied in quality, are a great taste of what could soon be coming to a stage near you.

This year’s Act II Festival is a slightly different affair to 2023. For a start, it’s in a new venue, albeit a late replacement, as the festival decamps from Canary Wharf’s The Space to Hounslow Arts Centre. And this year there is the opportunity to see the series of scratch plays over three nights rather than all in one day.

The change of venue certainly has some pros and cons. It’s much bigger for a start, so from a logistics point of view, probably much more helpful for the artists. And as lovely as the bar is at The Space, Hounslow Arts Centre offers a lot more room to mingle and chat afterwards. But the auditorium is perhaps a little too large, leaving actors performing to a lot of empty seats during the three evenings. It also means the audience is spaced out more and some of the atmosphere is lost that was generated from the packed-in-like-sardines crowd the festival played for at The Space.

Similarly, spreading the festival over three evenings (a decision apparently more about availability than by design) means the audience is sparser each evening. The Sunday, when all three sessions are repeated, feels livelier as the teams for all 13 shows are present. For 2025, it would be great to see the festival back to a full weekend again.

What hasn’t changed from last year though is Artistic Director Amy Tickner’s enthusiasm and support for all the young emerging creatives who are part of this year’s event. The whole ethos of Act II is to provide a stepping stone between student work and professional work, giving those involved a taste of what is needed to take their shows to a professional stage. It’s also great to see some of those involved last time back to help run things this year, no doubt passing on what they learned then and subsequently; Nell Rayner, Anya Anderson Birch and Luna Laurenti.

Of course, as great as any ethos is, and however much enthusiasm people can put into creating the festival, it still needs a good collection of shows to make it worthwhile. This year the two standouts are Maisie Allen’s Soggy Chips, which also includes probably the best solo performance of the festival from Jemima Langdon, and Vilma Paananen’s Cars That Drive Us Crazy, a show where I still don’t have a clue what it was all about but loved nonetheless! Both productions I really hope will be developed and put on a stage again sometime soon. There are also some important themes being explored elsewhere; knife crime, AI, race, gender – themes that we need to hear from younger voices because it’s these people that have been raised with such issues at the fore.

Yes, a few shows don’t quite hit the right beats, but that really doesn’t matter; this should always be a safe ground to test ideas and make mistakes, because sometimes it’s the mistakes that will teach those involved much more than when it all goes perfectly correct.  

As the arts are attacked more and more by a money obsessed Tory government who seem incapable of understanding that without them we would be a lot poorer in more ways than just money, it’s more important than ever that we have people like Tickner giving a chance for emerging artists to test the waters. She has grown this festival year upon year and I’m already down for whatever, and wherever, she takes us in 2025.

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Produced by: Act II

For more information about ACT II please visit their website here.

Individual reviews for each show can be found at: Session 1, Session 2, Session 3.