Last night I was invited to The Actors Forge showcase at Northern Stage. Running over two nights, it aims to showcase local talent and new writing with six new plays (five, on the night I attended: the Saturday has the full roster).

While obviously any such night has to be attended with different expectations than you would bring to a bigger budget, more mainstream production, there was definitely a lot to enjoy.

Vampires Don’t Play Fortnite by Dan Lemon (starring Oli Pages, Jack Andrews, Adam O’Neill and Emily Ashton) had a lot of fun with the concept of ancient vampires in a modern world, although when one tackles a concept that has been done so often and so well – most recently in What We Do in the Shadows – you are setting yourself a very high bar, which the piece unsurprisingly never quite manages. The writing also occasionally jarred, and sometimes felt too reliant on cheap jokes and easy laughs.

Hyperion by Lemon and German Garin, featuring Garin, Robert Brett and Jacob Miller, was a clever idea about the AI apocalypse and political overreach that played out tensely but couldn’t quite match its own ambitions.

Rounding out the first half was Not Dead Yet by Robert Carr, a charming and moving portrayal of a widower not quite ready to say goodbye to his wife, featuring Nicholas Odoni, Lynn Huntley, Sue Osbon and James McLoughlin.

John Torrance’s Taking the Biscuit is only in the Saturday showcase, so the first half opened with Steve Parry’s Raison D’etre, a tale of a disintegrating marriage that packed a killer final punch. (This starred Huntley, McLoughlin, Parry and Sarah Richards). The show closed with Lemon’s Locked Down, which mined gross-out laughs to great effect in a tale of students stuck together in the pandemic, starring Parry, McLoughlin, Daniel Melia and Max Wolfenden.

As with any showcase, some bits worked and some didn’t, and the acting was stronger in some places than in others. Direction, by Dan Lemon and Robert Carr, could also have been tighter at times. It was nice to see a mix of gender and ages on stage, though it would have been good to see more visible diversity (though I imagine this is peopled by the cohort of the Actors Forge, so I can’t comment on the pool of actors available).

My main criticism is that both staging and writing needed to be more thoughtful. Serious subjects sometimes felt glibly treated; queerness felt too often a punchline rather than a reality. (Surely – surely – we are past an age when a character can deadpan ‘sounds gay’ repeatedly to elicit laughs without that seeming to be challenged by either the other characters or the narrative?)

This is perhaps also illustrated by a lack of content warnings on either the printed material or in the introduction to the show, despite the fact that the material included some potentially triggering topics (including infant death). (There was an age advisory on the booking page of the website, but I couldn’t find any more specific guidance.) It’s easy to be all Daily Mail about such measures, but contrast this approach with the care a theatre such as Alphabetti shows to its audience when dealing with such subjects.

The staging also felt careless at times: I was sitting in the front row and still missed a chunk of Hyperion because one of the actors was positioned out of sightlines.

That said, these are relatively easy fixes, and hopefully ones that further productions will consider. It’s encouraging to see such a showcase at a main theatre like Northern Stage, and with a tighter rein on the writing and staging and a bit more thought to a wider audience, I’d be excited to see what they do next.

Details about the showcase can be found here:

The Actors Forge website is here.