Review by Simon Jenner, April 16 2026
★ ★ ★ ★
“I am every snack she’s taken!” complains an erudite baby: still in the womb. When Susanne Crosby was asked by Brighton Little Theatre to curate a series of new writing shorts, even she had no idea its birth might turn out quite like this. Steven Adams, who like Crosby helms three plays of a total of nine, adds deft touches to Crosby’s ordering throughout. They, Will Rosander (with Katie Ford assisting Adams in movement), Leigh Ward and writers Jo Gatford and Faith McNeill directing their own plays, bring Connections to Brighton Little Theatre till April 18.
That’s quite apart from Adams (as often) providing the versatile set with each play’s details touched-in, and with a neat ingenuity of drape-reveals. Unusually, Adams also designs and sequences the lighting which on this occasion shifts like the Aurora Borealis: there’s a dominant colour (like pink for the first, blue for the third, grey-green for the fifth and so on) but these shift crucially. More though, Adams brings out Crosby’s themes of children, loss, redemption and in a dramatic coup brings the last play back to the first. Along with Holly Everett they produce the plays; and with Myles Locke, design period-detailed costumes. Craig Hearn conjures – indeed apparates – props.
Evie McGuire as Linda in Susanne Crosby’s “The Piecture”. Photo Credit: Miles Davies
Nettie Sheridan Womb With a View directed by Steven Adams, Assistant Director Will Rosander
Known as a director/actor, Sheridan should certainly spend more time writing too. That’s if this zingy piece is any indication (and it clearly is) of her gift for witty dialogue, apposite reflection and garnering whoops of laughter. That’s partly down to Rosander’s movement, and in particular Katie Forde’s delivery and timing; and the Kate Bush soundtrack (‘Breathing’) which dates some of us. Bush too will return emblematically.
While waiting to be born, Foetus complains about their environment which drastically deteriorates with spicy diets. And sophisticated asides about being unable to watch anything or have internet access to pass “nine months” sounding worse than a prison term without charges for protesting against atrocities. Adams pulses some hideous pink lighting to green, to make Foetus feel truly at home. There’s several points when Ford suggests it’s really going to make her vom.
Worse, they develop a complete allergy to the whale music their mother foists on them, and contemplate the future with aesthetic dread. That’s despite no longer being the size of a lemon and “almost an avocado” – definitely not a BDS one in this sassy foetus’s hands. Ford moves fluently, speaks with aplomb and wicked pauses, and energises a long evening that somehow seems more like nine minutes.
Jo Gatford Half a Glass directed by Jo Gatford
Adams’ stage-right reveals a shadowy bier. Denise Tyler, making her stage debut (she’s an ACT student) stills the previous energy in a world of browns and drab drapes, as the volumes of a world shrink round her. Tyler’s debut during training of such a challenging piece, with nowhere to hide, is a remarkable feat.
As written and directed by Gatford, this is a piece teasing out the adjuncts of mourning, including several bottles. It’s not just that the unnamed narrator’s a professional drinker at a wake of her drinking partner; that’s in all senses. Damage and trauma is inherited. Her father and partner were alcoholics: she’s keeping them company till death. “Ghosts go with us till the end/This was a lover, perhaps, this a friend” as alcoholic 1890s poet Ernest Dowson puts it. A quiet piece, and paced in a leisurely diminuendo, there might be a way to vary the tempo slightly. As delivered though, this, one of the saddest pieces, carries its truth.
Susanne Crosby The Picture directed by Susanne Crosby
It’s 1948. Evie McGuire’s Linda is excited. Shyly. She’s not so much a sheltered young woman as curated, to coin a night’s phrase: by her stifling father. Thanks to ebullient Katie though she begins to blossom: goes to dances, catches the eye of a startlingly handsome young man. Katie shoves her into his arms and the achingly beautiful moments of a young woman falling deeply in love for the first time unfolds. Linda embarks on long romantic walks; talks about starting her new life with her fiancé.
McGuire’s nuances and gestures as a women breaking out of intolerable control – including financial – are both rapt and heartbreaking. As indeed is her period accent. Indeed something of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1938 The Death of the Heart is kin to this, a wafer slice of classic Bowen in itself, dashed with Patrick Hamilton. And Crosby’s writing isn’t diminished by such comparison.
Crosby and McGuire deliver the sucker-punch of the evening. This exquisitely acted, costumed, blocked and lit work builds to a moment worthy of some 1940s films. Craig Hearn as a photographer performs a non-speaking cameo.
Tess Gill Mastication directed by Steven Adams, Assistant Director Will Rosander
Like Sheridan, another revelation. Tess Gill, someone known for acting and directing, here delivers the first of two contrasted scripts. This is one of two three-handers and a darkly funny counterweight to Crosby’s piece. Indeed alongside Womb, and one later work, it garnered the greatest laughs of the evening, skilfully written-in as predictive gags. Much use is made of spotlighting the gum and crisp consumer at key-lit intervals.
It certainly proves crunching is complicated. Think Mike Bartlett’s noirish workplace satire Contractions rewritten by the ghost of Douglas Adams. Two colleagues – mainly the first – attend their therapy session after a singular work incident. Whilst Philip Bremmer’s A deftly proves his Millennial ignorance of certain films, he plays straight-man to two comic acts. Patti Griffiths’ deadpan B is a dedicated office-worker who can’t get sounds out of her head. Griffiths builds a reasonable OCD-type whose experience of her obliviously noisy if kind colleague winds her into ever greater convolutions: some later seen from her colleague’s standpoint. After the unbelievable truth of B, Georgia Stephanou’s C shows cheery bafflement. Stephanou has though throughout enacted – when spotlit stage-right – a burlesque of chewing and crisp-swallowing to upend any office. Uproarious.
Simon Jenner White Thing directed by Susanne Crosby
In the spirit of Joseph Cotton’s music critic in Citizen Kane, considering the dramatic merits or otherwise of this depressing little piece are outside my remit, since I wrote it. Crosby spotted it as a London Playwrights Workshop performance by a TV actress on YouTube, and asked permission.
Crosby then added a voiceover introduction (here spoken in character by Kate Peltzer Dunn) to frame the piece as an interview. And christened actor Caroline Marchant Mrs Fairleigh. Occasional words were added for dramatic clarification onstage.
As Crosby notes: “A woman is interviewed about a personal tragedy and the effect on her and her MP husband.” Death, xenophobia, government cosplaying evil and redemption. As Sheridan cheerily notes, it was bound to be political. I can only say that as one director pointed out, it wasn’t to be expected that a fine TV actor’s rendition would be surpassed by someone only essaying their third role.
This was not envisaged as a theatre piece. Crosby’s blocking, and Marchant’s emotional truth, pauses, fragile reveals – and movement – are frankly a revelation. The combined DNA of cast and creatives has altered the work, as it should. Praise too for the political navy suit sourced by Crosby and Locke.
Thankfully, the interval followed.
Patti Griffiths as B, in Tess Gill’s “Mastication”. Photo Credit: Miles Davies
Faith McNeill Leaks directed by Faith McNeill
An up-tempo piece written and directed by McNeill, reveals a writer who on this basis we want to know more of. And indeed Leaks – which boasts the finest sound-system I’ve heard for ages with a run-around to catch drips – is as it were a drip-feed of metaphor. Crosby writes: “A caretaker has a chance conversation with a boarder in the building in this Kafkaesque encounter.” Yes, yet…
Landlady or caretaker Saskia Monteiro, is a sassy young woman with a wacky headband and dungarees whizzing for some time on a physical theatre spree. Monteiro’s clearly a natural comedian. Will this be, bar drips, silent? Suddenly the radiant Lewis Todhunter appears. And hesitates. To Monteiro’s probing, clearly intrigued, pique, attracted, Todhunter keeps a Pintersque reticence. Terse to the point of epigram, laconic and lapidary, he refuses initially to reveal what it is he has in his room. You begin to think Bluebeard’s Castle, but this has a different feel.
Power shifts between the two. Todhunter holds words close to himself; his room, closer. Yet the man’s slow thawing somehow engenders a reluctance on Monteiro’s part. She’s curious though. What will happen? And what, after the platonic curtain falls, will happen next? This brief, teasing two-hander balances, frustrates, intrigues.
Sam Nixon Perfect directed by Susanne Crosby
Maternity and its traumas can be transmitted. Sam Nixon performs her own piece, deftly blocked and directed by Crosby.
Susan, laden with Waitrose bags (possibly borrowed from the current Almeida production of A Doll’s House!) is full of her grandson Charlie. And less full perhaps of daughter Rebecca. What emerges over the next 12 minutes is guilt. As Nixon, coiffed to an inch of the home counties discloses, she made a decision at Rebecca’s birth: it was life-saving but complicates things. There’s fears. Beneath the koochy bluster, it’s clear Charlie presents at two year’s old some chronic health issues.
It’s clear too that Nixon’s Susan is someone who coiffes life to within an inch of its death (make-up and costume almost regal here), and can’t tolerate anything messy or imperfect. The filtering of offstage voices amplifies Susan’s character: Rebecca’s tolerant, kind husband Dan, the silent yet mute reproaches of Susan’s supportive husband.
Nixon unpeels reluctance like an artichoke. Tempo gradually increases as she comes to a decision. It’s a piece of stillness, slow reveals, and heart.
Ethan Taylor Snakes//Ladders directed by Leigh Ward
Two twenty-something sisters clean in a block of flats contemplating a world where they’ll live in permanent precarity. Though nominally set in the future, I didn’t recognise this because it’s happening now. Younger Millennials and Zoomers especially have no hope of secure accommodation, let alone buying their own space. The weekend this finishes sees a rent march in London, the largest for decades. This, like White Thing, is overtly political though a lot more sly.
For the most part of its 20 plus minutes, it’s a two-hander. But wait. Capable Freema (Isobel Stoner, new to BLT) dungareed and informed, reminds one of third-wave feminists.
Freema’s as usual cleaning the large flat (here neatly detailed with pot-plants everywhere, sporting greenish and blueish lighting) of a woman not currently there. Her sister Holli (Robyn Ives, a recent Ariel here and Dormouse) is baffled.
Freema exhibits a tender expertise for tender plants, chides the woman for not knowing where to place each as they dry. She instructs Holli on moving several about. One on a shelf needs special attention. Odd Freema moves it there. Turns out the old lady won’t be coming back.
Holli keeps snagging details though. A nephew, only known relative, long vanished. No-one will claim the flat. It reverts to a Residents Association, shifted to a digitalised future. Freema’s partner is also the building’s caretaker, who can swerve that. A future beckons.
Stoner is every inch sussed operator and sophist. Ives by comparison the younger innocent is nonplussed, even outraged. Slowly dynamics shift as tension builds; you fear an outcome. They’re interrupted by the arrival of Craig Hearn, last seen in The Lion in Winter: he’s Daniel the nephew, alerted by Adrian opposite. Dripping privilege, Daniel says they must visit some resort, the beaches… As for this place – Hearn’s bland obliviousness deserves an injection of reality. Holli begins to see the light, and dark.
Tess Gill Tidying Up directed by Steven Adams, Assistant Director Will Rosander
Gill’s other piece contrasts with her ebullient Mastication. Again more of the stage is stripped back to reveal layered decking against steady blue light. Susanne Crosby, now taking the single role, is Jean.
Jean tidies a grave and talks about her life. Quietly, with affect and a tempo that never curdles, Crosby moves about in Jean’s mind and the ground. It’s clear her husband has been dead only a year. Jean reminisces on their daughter Annie too. Slowly unskeined details abound about memory and loss, desire and the letting-go of a portion of life long ago. In contrast with the slightly brittle but softening Susan, Jean as realised by Crosby is both gentle and accepting, to the point of heartbreak.
It’s not a plot-driven piece, but an unfolding one, which as the evening winds down seems the perfect still-point to end on. Yet there’s a coup, and Adams hasn’t finished yet. Nor it seems has Kate Bush. The cyclic nature of the three-hour evening is summarised in around 45 seconds of gestural brio and affirmation.
With one exception (of course!), this is the most remarkable showcase of new writing acting and direction I’ve seen in Brighton or the south-east. There were moments in just two where tempi could be picked up, and where material might be slightly telescoped. It hardly matters though. A must-see for anyone in the area wishing to see what might happen next.
Stage Manager Liv Jeffery
Photography Miles Davies. Design Holly Everett
Robyn Ives as Holli and Isobel Stoner as Freema in Ethan Tyler’s “Snakes??Ladders”. Photo Credit: Miles Davies
