On the Edge: Exploring Nowt Part Of and Shiny New Festival

This month a plucky audience will gather in Salford’s Black Lion for a training seminar. The dubiously named MacGuffin Industries are set to give a lecture on ‘efficiency for the modern business’ – but at some point, someone will bite the dust. This is the unlikely premise of To Die for Entertainment’s new show, Squaring the Circle. The brainchild of Rob Ireland, it’s a bizarre mash-up of murder mystery and business nonsense lingo.

Squaring the Circle is one of six shows playing at Nowt Part Of, a fringe theatre festival launching this year at the Salford pub and taking place in its John Cooper Clarke Theatre. “It’s all contemporary works,” says director Mike Francis Carvalho. “We wanted to do something that was original, something different. We didn’t want to tread down the same tracks as everything else.”

Carvalho says the festival’s name (not to be confused with the previously run Not Part Of) has been taken a bit too seriously. “It’s just a tongue-in-cheek thing. It’s a funny word that’s part of Manchester speak. It gives us a simple identity: the festival isn’t part of Manchester International Festival or anything else. But it will be a softer kind of mirror to what’s happening at MIF.”

The fledgling festival put out the word on Twitter, and Carvalho banded together a diverse mix of plays. “The rules were simple: no more than four actors with as many characters as you like and a maximum run time of one hour.” This year’s shows – all from Northwest writers – include Stephanie Claire’s Confessions of a Waitress; a comedy from the Nuts and Bolts Theatre Company called The Harpington Toad Fanciers Social; James Antonio’s work about vanity and greed, Face Value, and two one-man shows from Josh Coates and Jon Coleman, Stevie Wonder’s Stern Warning / Waiting Man. Nowt Part Of will also stage Carvalho’s own Vienna, a witty story about one man’s obsession with Ultravox and Midge Ure.

“I didn’t want to make it so much of a new writing event,” says Carvalho. “You see those words, ‘new writing’ and ‘fringe’, and it scares the general public off a bit. I wanted to make it more open access, so passers-by would see the posters, come in and not feel threatened by something alien. They’re not mainstream plays, but they’re accessible and there’s something for all tastes.”

In Liverpool, the Shiny New Festival is making a similar contribution to the Northwest’s homegrown fringe scene. Now in its second year, the festival, like Nowt Part Of, also takes place in just one venue – The Lantern Theatre. Director Peter Mitchelson says Shiny New was born out of a desire to give Liverpool voices a real platform. “The city has a huge amount of performers and great talent. But in some ways a Liverpool fringe has been lacking; after people have had a bit of success, they tend to move to London straight away.”

Shiny New also aims to give the city’s audiences the chance to see Edinburgh-bound work first. “There’s an excitement in that,” says Mitchelson, “it’s the first time you’ll see this show. These guys might go on to be on TV in a few years.”

On the bill this summer are The Brief Afterlife of Reginald Tanner, a parody of the NHS set in a dystopian future; comedy magic from David Alnwick; musical comedy duo Jollyboat, and stand-up Sam Avery’s debut full-length show about his short-lived stint in a heavy metal band. There’s no theme, says Mitchelson, who’s taken an organic approach to programming by using his contacts from his job as a lighting technician and freelance theatre director – and featuring new works by artists from Shiny New 2012.

Compact and affordable, Nowt Part Of and Shiny New might be just the ticket for those looking for something intimate – and a little off-the-wall.