Christopher Tester

Please find below a (hopefully) growing number of press reviews and features about the shows I have been involved in.  So many 'online' articles tend to be deleted or go missing randomly, so I thought it best to put them all in one place for your viewing 'pleasure' rather than just present a list of potential defunct links.

Time Out Review - 10/09/07

Until Sep 16 Rosemary Branch Theatre, 2 Shepperton Rd, N1 3DT

Proclaimed by the British Medical Journal as one of the first, and most explicit portraits of schizophrenia in literature, ‘Diary of a Madman’ isn’t just an extraordinary sketch of one man’s insanity. Written in 1834, Nikolai Gogol’s dark, comedic short is also a pithy depiction of the gnawing tedium of life six links from the bottom of the administrative food chain. And it’s made painfully familiar in Fail Better’s accomplished, one-man performance.

Through a series of diary entries written over the course of a year, it tells the story of Axenty Ivanovich (played by an enchanting Christopher Tester) a class-obsessed, middle-ranking civil servant in Tsarist Russia whose ascent to imagined greatness coincides with his descent into madness. The play begins with humorous pedantry – it takes several minutes of obsessive tidying, rigorous clothes-folding and pencil-over-blank-page-hovering before Ivanovich utters his first words. But the laughter soon gives way to something more sinister. An unrequited crush on his superior’s daughter seems to trigger a latent psychosis, culminating in a series of disturbing, albeit imagined events (the murder of a talking dog that ruminates on his desperate position, his discovery that he’s actually the King of Spain) before he is committed to an asylum.

Under Jonathan Heron’s terse direction, Tester (who adapted the text for stage with Heron) offers an absorbing performance in this Beckettian drama, even if he doesn’t appear as comfortable in despair as he is in comedy and frantic derangement. Aided by Dave Thwaites’ clever lighting design, Nomi Everall’s cut-away bedroom set perfectly captures the claustrophobic mania that envelopes the affecting narrative, a reminder that madness sits dangerously close to us all.
Tamara Gausi , Mon Sep 10

London Lite - 13/09/07

Shepton Journal - 06/09/07



Western Gazettee - 6/09/07

The Scotsman **** - 15/08/02
 

CRAVE is a small, jagged, beautiful thing, in the small but dazzling collection of plays
left behind by Sarah Kane. It is not an easy play to perform - so many ideas and
emotions, so little time. But Fail Better, a young company of recent graduates from
Warwick University, have created a careful, well-thought out production which is gutwrenchingly
effective.

The four actors sit or stand at the corners of a square, among shards of broken glass
and barbed wire. But look more carefully and you see that the glass is not strewn but
placed in a glittering mosaic, and the barbed wire twinkles with fairy lights. This is
Crave through and through, a play on the knife edge between beauty and
destructiveness.

Crave is a play full of images and stories. A little boy has an imaginary friend. He
takes her to the beach and they play on the sand. Then an old man comes up out of
the sea and steals her away. The next day, the body of a little girl is washed up on the
shore. It speaks of the imprint of the subconscious on the conscious, what connects us
to our past and why we cannot escape it.

It is full of poetry, but with a dark subtext of abuse, damage, rape, loss, the havoc
wreaked on one human being by another. The actors deftly handle the interweaving
lines which never quite become conversations, the fractured characters who almostbut never quite connect, and end up more alone than before. There is a particularly strong performance from Helen Bradbury, whose account of abuse and self-abuse
has a harrowing fascination, her scream of despair stops the heart. Though the static
nature of the production is challenging, it illustrates powerfully how the characters are
unable to move on.

Ultimately, what makes Crave so powerful is not its despair, but the way it juxtaposes
that with beauty, as if holding up the possibility of light makes the darkness all the
darker. It's a tough play for a young company, but this production serves to remind us
that this is a young play: its writer was just 28 when she took her own life. In
Edinburgh's dark Underbelly, it shines as if the ink was still fresh, the tears were still wet.

 

The List **** - 15/08/02

Kane’s classic revived

In an underground cavern of the underbelly, on a simple, beautifully lit, set adorned
with fairy lights and detritus, a young company do something that throws one back to
the old fringe, where young unhyped, first rate companies could be found in little out
of the way spaces.

Sarah Kane’s dialogue for four voices, arguably different aspects of the same
personality, speaks of disaffection, the need for love and the inability to accept it
when it comes.

Jonathan Heron directs four fine young actors, two in formal dress, two in t-shirt and skivvy, through a moving and beautifully timed exploration of the mind.  Timed and acted to perfection.

Go make the discovery.
Steve Cramer

 

The Herald **** - 14/08/02 

It's no coincidence that the last words of Sarah Kane's tone poem of purging and
redemption are "happy and free". Because, coming as it did at the fag end of the
nineties, a decade where the black and whites of belief systems had been absorbed,
bastardised, or just wiped-out, here was a plea from the dark chasing after something
better.

Crave is a holy play in this way, a representation of a period of individual
internalisation in search of a saviour that's now moved on and come blinking into the
public light once more. And, while Fail Better's new production, delivered with
well-drilled commitment by a young cast, gives it a renewed vigour along with a fairly
solid context, there's still a danger of mistaking the piece as a stream -of-conscious
cry for help, setting Kane up as a poster girl for angst-ridden adolescents.
Because, as well as heart and soul, there's real craft to Kane's work, especially here,
in a profoundly optimistic work which, like all great art, attempts to transcend the
everyday to somewhere other.
Neil Cooper

 

Fest Magazine **** - 14/08/02

Sarah Kane’s acclaimed Crave is an exploration of relationships and “the games we play, the lies we tell”. The four actors are posed among a set of broken glass and fairylights, facing the audience and addressing us separately. At points modern and at others timeless and achingly human, their stories occasionally seem to connect but are ultimately ambiguous.

There are phrases, incomplete tales and cries for help, often hinging on doom-laden
epithets. The atmosphere is sexual and violent, mirroring the text’s balance of
intimacy and anxiety. It is short, less than 40 minutes, and the ending comes all too
soon with a suggestion of redemption. But not much.

Amy Liptrot