The Southsea Shakespeare Actors head to the movies

This may be a sequel '“ but there's no reason to suspect it won't be up to the high standards of the first two instalments of The Southsea Shakespeare Actors' Songologues.
By The Newsroom
Published 22nd Aug 2016, 10:46 BST
Updated 22nd Aug 2016, 11:50 BST
SSA's The Songologues, Vol. III - The Big Screen Edition. Back Row, left to right: Vincent Adams, Roger Easey, Susie Coutts, Courtney Appleton and Hazel Aspden. Front Row, left to right: Nick Downes, Sue Bartlett, Amy Barlow and Aaron Holdaway.SSA's The Songologues, Vol. III - The Big Screen Edition. Back Row, left to right: Vincent Adams, Roger Easey, Susie Coutts, Courtney Appleton and Hazel Aspden. Front Row, left to right: Nick Downes, Sue Bartlett, Amy Barlow and Aaron Holdaway.
SSA's The Songologues, Vol. III - The Big Screen Edition. Back Row, left to right: Vincent Adams, Roger Easey, Susie Coutts, Courtney Appleton and Hazel Aspden. Front Row, left to right: Nick Downes, Sue Bartlett, Amy Barlow and Aaron Holdaway.

The troupe will be performing the lyrics of popular songs, stripped of their music and transformed into a monologue, dialogue, or wherever the muse leads them.

This time out, after tackling love and The Best of British, this time it’s The Movie Edition, and as they say, ‘It’s the songs you know... but not as you know them.’

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Nick Downes, one of the performers explains the idea’s roots: ‘The first person I think to do something similar was back in the ’60s when Peter Sellers did a Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles in the style of Richard III. More recently (show director) Matt came across a woman on Youtube doing what she called Beyoncelogues, that treated her lyrics as monologues, you know: ‘If you liked it, you should have put a ring on it’, all that sort of stuff, and from there he thought, you could do this with lots of songs.

‘He got a team of us together and for the first one the theme was fairly obvious, I suppose, as it was love.

‘The second one was The Best of British, and songs associated with British artists. This one is the big screen edition, so they’re all associated in some way with films.’

Using minimal props and staging, the team of actors will be conjuring new life into the songs.

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‘It’s a very enjoyable creative process. It’s great fun putting them together and in quite a lot of cases we go through a number of ideas.

‘It helps sometimes when you’ve got people in the group who’ve never heard the song, as they can look at without being distracted by how it usually sounds.

‘As a result of this, you get an enormous range of different styles for different songs.

‘Some of them do stand up as really more or less poetry – we’ve got a Leonard Cohen one in this time – while others seem to be full of comic potential.’

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Without wanting to give too much away about what’s in the show, Nick says: ‘There will be a Bond song or two, some interesting takes on some of the Disney and Pixar films, and one or two more going back to the classics of the ’50s and ’60s.

‘We try to make it as varied as possible.’

Songologues III: The Movie Edition

Rosie’s, Southsea

August 30-September 1

ticketsource.co.uk/ssa