The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show ****

The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show celebrates its 20^th anniversary at this year’s Brighton Fringe with a lively collection of short-form theatre. The show offers a series of vignettes, short scenes of new writing. These are designed to entertain, of course, but in some cases may serve as a springboard for full-length productions.

The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show offers two different versions of performances – the ‘Early Riser’ and ‘Late Brekkie’, with the audience being offered a complementary tea or coffee and a brioche, lending a relaxed, café style experience. The scenes may be comedic or dramatic in nature.

The Early Riser consists of five plays:

1.      Stag Do - Tom Willshire.

The scene is, as the name suggests, a stag party, but an unexpectedly sparse one. The groom welcomes his seemingly unlikely colleague, who discovers that he is the only other guest, the best man initially absent after a falling out. With no sign of any other attendees, the premise leans into awkwardness. The best man eventually flamboyantly flounces in, the trio ill-suited to such an occasion. A series of interchanges ensue, the comedy deriving from social class and cultural differences.

2.      Cate Blanchett Wants to Be My Friend on Facebook - Alex Broun.

Set in a construction site office, this absurdist piece begins with a baffling social media request from a famous film star. The premise escalates when she appears at the site in person, asking for one of the site employees. The woman is desperate for friendship, but social norms and boundaries have been breached.

3.      Sweet Smell Of Lemon - Simon Birkbeck.

A business owner running a cleaning product company attempts to integrate an ill-suited and awkward recruit into her commission-only sales team. Her attempts at instilling company values fall on stony ground. Shades of Mamet and Pinter.

4.      Bottomless - Tom Willshire.

Three women meet at a mutual friend’s untimely wake. The friend has arranged for a bottomless brunch of food an alcohol, leaving explicit instructions for the nature of the wake, and a surprise to come. Despite their shared grief, the social and attitudinal differences between the trio seem likely to fracture the group. This friction is exacerbated by the surprise component.

5.      Big Fish, Little Fish - by Joel Jones.

A playful and stylised pastiche of the film noir gumshoe movie. A private detective interacts with a bartender, a woman and, surreally, his own accompanying saxophonist, predominantly using cliches from the bygone era. The dialogue is witty and delivered with relentless pace.

The ensemble - Andy Bell, Phil Nair-Brown, Susanne Crosby, Neil Drew, Kate Peltzer Dunn, Kate Thomas, Lex Lake – deliver these vignettes professionally and entertainingly. Direction from Suse Crosby and Sophia George kept the pace brisk.

Bottomless seems the most likely candidate for development into a full-length production. Dramaturgically, it contained innate and believable conflict and relatability, and it afforded the actors the opportunity to play their intentions.