Ahead of the opening of The Big Bite-Size Show at London’s Pleasance Theatre, Bite-Size Plays founder Nick Brice reveals what it takes to perform eight mini-plays in one performance, and why he hopes the show will bring communities together.
For the past 18 years, Bite-Size Plays has taken The Big Bite-Size Show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where a number of mini-plays are performed within a standard 90 minute running time.
Now for the first time, the company is bringing its show to London, with performances beginning this Wednesday at the Pleasance Theatre.
“We’ve got some wonderful players and some wonderful people. It’s a fantastic collection,” Bite-Size Plays founder Nick Brice tells The Theatre Playbook. “For years, it’s done really well [in Edinburgh], but we’re trying London. We’re going to see if we can build up the same following in London.”
Brice first started writing short plays in 2003, and one script even made the final of a competition in Sydney in 2005, leading him to travel around the world to watch the eight-minute performance.
“It was runner up and that’s great, but I saw some other ones – there were a few that just stood out as ‘mini masterpieces.’ They’re complete as they are,” he says. He then brought some of those scripts back to Brighton where he put on a show that he later took to Edinburgh for the first time in 2006.
Rather than simply an extended scene, Brice describes a short play as having a “proper start, middle and end,” making it a complete experience that runs to just 10 minutes in length, sometimes less.
“The secret for me is usually a really clear and strong character, or characters that establish themselves very early, an interesting scenario that I’m interested in and care about on some level, and then something transformative,” Brice explains. “Something happens that I either didn’t expect, get charmed by, get excited by or get moved by within 10 minutes and then leaves me feeling something, talking about something and thinking about something rather than just being entertained, even though entertainment’s the primary role.”
He also tries to make his shows a “rollercoaster” for the audience, with the line-up of plays in each performance offering a mixture of genres, whether something silly or daft will be followed by an emotionally moving story, or something sharp and satirical. “You’ll also get one monologue,” he says. “We try and do at least one monologue in the show. Then there’s two handers, three handers, four handers. The biggest one is six hander in this show.”
At Pleasance Theatre, The Big Bite-Size Show will offer a first menu of eight plays from Wednesday, March 5 to Saturday, March 8, before a second line-up is performed from Wednesday, March 12 to Saturday, March 15. They include some of the company and audience’s favourites chosen from numerous performances in Edinburgh and Brighton. Bite-Size Plays also featured in a series on Sky Arts from 2010-13.
But even audience members who might be familiar with the plays due to be performed will be in for some surprises, where one central character has been gender-swapped and other character ages have shifted slightly.
With new actors among the cast, they will also put their own spin on their characters.
“There’s eight actors who make up a cast of seven each week,” Brice says. “Obviously, they’ve got their own interpretation, the directors are different, the staging is different, The Pleasance is a different space, so each of those variables come through in a fresh and unique expression of each play.”
When it comes to the staging, a show in Edinburgh might have had props such as tables and chairs hidden in the shadows at the back of the stage, ready to be brought forward when needed. At the Pleasance, however, a series of black and white blocks will be used to amend the stage in different ways for each play.
“It’s like a kind of a building kit,” Brice notes. “Each set is built for each play, and the actors will whiz on stage and quickly move the blocks around and create a different situation with a few props and costumes. It’s very effective. If you’re given enough of a sketch of where you are and what’s going on, your imagination does the rest. It’ll look quite cool, interesting and engaging.”
Backstage, Bite-Size Plays has developed its own “methodology” to help the cast embrace the numerous different characters they are asked to play in one performance after working with a theatre coach back in 2008.
“We needed actors to be able to walk off stage as one character and within a minute come back on as a different one, so there’s an internal process that all of our actors learn because if you’re doing another play, you’ve got to create meaning right away,” says Brice. The challenge then is to avoid actors simply returning to the stage in a different costume and asking the audience to believe they’re someone else.
“They have to come on as a completely different character, so we work on the internal process you need to go through to connect with the deeper aspects of that character and bring them onto the stage in a way that’s engaging and interesting.”
In The Big Bite-Size Show, there’s only a couple of occasions where one actor will leave the stage, only to return moments later as a new character. “But you’ve only got 10 minutes to get ready for maybe another one, and you might have moved some set as well, so you have to have the tools to be able to reset yourself as a performer into a new character and then be convincing when you come back on stage,” Brice continues. “We take that quite seriously and do quite a lot of work to do that.”
But by performing eight plays back-to-back, Brice hopes the show gives its audience something to talk about and invites them to “compare notes” on their favourite plays.
“The nice thing about The Big Bite-Size Show is it brings lots of different people together of different ages, different cultures, and gives them something in common to share and talk about,” he says. “We think it actually makes a really good difference to a community as well, particularly in this modern era where we’re all looking at screens all the time. It’s nice to actually get in a room with a load of people, have a combined in-person experience, talk about it with each other and then have a drink about it afterwards in the bar. Part of the mission is to help inspire communities to get a bit closer as well.”
The Big Bite-Size Show plays at the Pleasance Theatre from March 5-15. Tickets here.
Top image: The Interpreter by Jonathan Kaufman. Photo: Kath Benson