"Lovecraft" / "Five Green Bottles"

It’s a busy couple of weeks in Cardiff, for those interested in performance. The biennial Festival of Voice, produced by the Wales Millennium Centre is attracting stars of the magnitude of Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Laura Marling, but there’s also a lot going on in terms of smaller scale, theatrical events. Thus I went to see “Lovecraft (Not The Sex Shop In Cardiff)”, a poppy musical take on the science of relationships written and performed by Carys Eleri. Great fun, and, one would hope, sure to attract attention when it plays in Edinburgh, come Festival time.

"Lovecraft"

Then, as well as the brilliant Young Artists’ Festival at The Other Room (to which I paid a highly enjoyable visit as a punter this year, having participated as a director last year), there is the Cardiff Fringe Theatre Festival, in which a lot of small companies take over non-traditional venues. So, it was downstairs at the Little Man Coffee bar that I saw “Five Green Bottles”, a new play which started out as a dark take on the 1960s sexual revolution and got still darker; it’s a piece which certainly deserves to be seen again.