The Missing Special - Play at Brighton's Fringe Festival

I like to support those who support me so when I heard Richard Hearn who runs Paragraph Planet had written a play and that it was being performed in Brighton as part of the Fringe Festival, I had to go.

I asked a friend if she fancied it and she did. So a quick trip then turned into a long weekend away! As her birthday was coming up I treated her to tickets and we went to the matinee performance - the first airing of it - on Sunday afternoon.

The play, The Missing Special, sees a couple meeting to celebrate their anniversary, but there is much more going on here. We are taken back to the lost year when everything went wrong. Having taken his eye off the ball for a moment at work the maths mad Rufus ends up charged with fraud. We see Rufus' downfall until a piece of evidence comes to light falling in his favour and finally sets him free. But there are consequences for his relationship.....aren't there?

The acting is brilliant. Two of the actors play several people and slip into the roles easily. The touches of humour are good and often the speech is fast paced (how do they remember all those lines!). The play was performed at the Rialto, an intimate venue with a bar area and the theatre above it. It was a hot afternoon and I felt sorry for the lead actor as he was wearing a shirt and jumper and was obviously rather warm.

It's the kind of play you could see again to catch the stuff you might have missed in the rapid fire of lines first time around. The play runs for one hour and you can catch it this week only. Worth a trip to Brighton for!