The Bird and The Bee
August 11th, 2008 • festival, theatre
Al Smith’s pair of plays - writing one, exec producing the pair - have picked up a pair of strong reviews in The Scotsman.
IT’S inevitable that people will want to compare Matt Hartley and Al Smith’s two new interconnecting plays. Smith, the writer of The Bird, has had an illustrious career at the Fringe with company Kandinsky, while Hartley won the prestigious Royal Exchange Bruntwood Competition for new writing last year. Both met and decided to create separate pieces, drawing inspiration from the Bridgend teenage suicides and a bizarre condition called “colony collapse disorder” – where honey bees willingly leave a colony to die, seemingly without reason.
It’s really pleasing to see both works reviewed as part of a whole, proving that kind of experiment in writing can find a critical home. Pragmatically, a pair of four star reviews should sell also tickets through to the end of the festival, and puts both in the running for a Fringe first. Fingers crossed.
