Next Up
Ashley will be performing in the Bellrock Christmas Show on Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd December. Details and ticket info to follow.
Recent News
Ashley has just finished filming a new comedy pilot with The Comedy Unit.
Bellrock Company Lab
Ashley is working with the newly named Bellrock Company to produce their second Lab performance at the Tron Theatre on Sunday 16th October. This months showing will be an exciting presentation of Hamlet, the Bad Quarto. See Tron Theatre Glasgow website for more details and tickets.
Go Now
Ashley is performing in Go Now at Arches Live on 23rd and 24th September
Futureproof – Post Festival
Ashley has just finished a run of Futureproof at the Edinburgh Festival. If you missed it you can still see it at Dundee Rep from 31st August until 10th September.
Don Giovanni and Futureproof
Ashley is currently in rehearsals for Don Giovanni. Which will be performed as part of the Oran Mor ‘classic cuts’ season from June 27th until July 2nd and will then begin rehearsals for Futureproof by Lynda Radley, performed at the Traverse for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival before a 2 week run at Dundee Rep Theatre.
Mother Courage – Big Issue Review
The setting is the 17th century 30 Years War, one of the most devastating in Europe’s history; the aesthetic is that of the Spanish Civil War, all mismatched army fatigues and a bombed-out backdrop graffitied with an anarchist’s mark; the mindset of the characters is timeless and never more contemporary, although it could equally apply to any war-torn country or era. Across northern Europe in the 1600s, the Mediterranean in the 1930s or Libya today, it’s easy to imagine civilians being subjected to the same soul-eroding mix of terror, desperation and futile ennui as Mother Courage and her children.
Performed by the inclusive theatre company Birds of Paradise, this version of Brecht’s pitch black musical comedy (using Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall’s translation) capably mirrors the sense of world-weary laughter in the face of horror that must surely be the only means of retaining sanity when existence is reduced to survival at any cost. Much of this is down to Alison Peebles in the lead role, who imagines the character as a sharp-tongued Scots matriarch with an acid deadpan and a wicked verbal flick of a swear-word that’s just enough to keep she and her three children alive. Or for a time, at least, in the case of upright Eilif (Paul Chaal), dopey but dependable Swiss Cheese (Johnny Austin) and mute Kattrin
(Ashley Smith, a wonderfully natural and expressive performer even without dialogue).
A small-time war profiteer who drags her cart around the battlefields selling shirts and supplies, Courage might these days be more suitably described as some kind of tinpot disaster capitalist, a most lowly example of the market moving in to clear up where war has blasted a new landscape of opportunity into being. Called a ‘parasite’ in peacetime by the Chaplain (Keith Macpherson) who is happy to live off her favour during conflict, Courage is sanguine about the whole business: for the poor, she muses, life is a struggle whether cannons are firing overhead or not.
Yet even as she pines for war to continue so her living might continue, necessity becomes selfish hypocrisy as each of her children is forced by the conflict into a position which might cost their life. Loyalty is also a casualty, as the group are forced to shuttle back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism depending on whose lines they’re behind – for an adaptation that’s touring provincial Scots theatres, the opportunity for a little light ribbing of both sects has been taken. Broadly, in fact, the right tone is set throughout, although the line between pathos and black amusement is, perhaps deliberately, a fine one. A bright and jerky supertitle screen is distracting, though, and draws attention to areas of the play which are perhaps slightly under-rehearsed.
3/5 – original review.
Mother Courage
Ashley is currently in rehearsals for Mother Courage with Birds of Paradise, in the part of Kattrin.
This will tour from March until April 2nd.
Pobby and Dingin Win Equity Award
Pobby and Dingan won The Equity Award for Best Show for Children and Young People yesterday night.
Pobby and Dingan was a Catherine Wheels Theatre Company production, in association with Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh in which Ashley played the character of Kellyanne.
Snow Queen
Ashley is currently in rehearsals for the Snow Queen at the Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh where she will perform from December 2nd – 31st.