Friday, August 14, 2020

UNDER A CARDBOARD SEA (Bristol Old Vic)***

 

By Megan

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSqkaioqF8

Available until: Unknown

Under the Cardboard Sea is a play for over 100 children and young people (aged 5-25) from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. I think the children had lots of the ideas and Silva Semerciyan wrote the script for them and turned it into a story where everything was linked up. I was very impressed by the inventiveness in the story. There were lots of ideas I haven’t heard of before.

My sisters Louise and Imogen like acting so I have seen a lot of brilliant plays with children in. The Bristol Old Vic School is really famous so I knew they would be good too but it was like watching grown up actors. They all said their lines with lots of confidence and it just sounded real. Some of the children sing really well too. They speak about some quite complicated scientific subjects but they say their lines as though they completely understand what they were saying. That helped me to understand it too.

Some things in this play are really sad. The children in it work really long hours which wouldn’t be allowed now and they have to do some really dangerous things. Disabled people don’t get any help unless they pay for it and that is almost impossible when they can’t work. Everyone thinks mechanical things are more important than people because you can replace people with somebody else. I thought that was really strange at first but then I started thinking a lot of people are like that now like when they play with their phones and send texts instead of talking to the people who they are with. That can be dangerous too if they aren’t paying attention. At one time children really were forced to work this hard and to put themselves in danger and sometimes they got hurt or even died. It is scary to think about that. It makes me realise that I am really lucky now. 

Sadie Gray plays the main character Addie King and I think she will be a West End actor one day. She speaks her lines so well and although the character is calm and strong you can feel everything is really hard for her. She really wants to help her family but she knows the place where she works isn’t a good place and she wants to change things so everyone is happy and safe. Matt Landau plays Clockface who is cruel to the children in his care but I didn’t hate him because he has had a sad life and he has been treated badly too. There is also a romance between Benji (Richard Ainsley) and Lucy (Amy Smith). He is poor and she believes she will be a big star. I thought it was really realistic because it is just like Imogen and her boyfriends.

The only thing I’m not really sure about is the rating for the show. It says this play is for 7+ I am nine and this play really upset me and scared me. There was a really scary scene with a train and something really horrible happened. There are lots of really horrible things that happen to people in the play and I felt really sad and scared. I know some people don’t mind things like that but some people do so I think there should be warnings. It is a good play but I don’t think I will watch it again till I’m much older. Maybe when I am 13 I won’t mind the scary things so much.

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