The Daily Bread
This 2014 show for Badapple was part of our 'No Hall Too Small' series which saw actor-clown Colin Moncrieff tour the country with a one-man show with a number of characters, live-baking and a full set from Catherine Dawn. So you will just have to imagine the aroma of freshly baked bread drifting out over the audience as you listen to the tall tales of August de Ville....
York Press review, 2014:
YES, that really was a working oven on stage at Ripley Town Hall on Thursday night for The Daily Bread, Badapple Theatre’s new show that comes with “live baking”.
It is a one-man show and that man is Colin Moncrieff , a Glaswegian actor, raconteur and professional clown who once worked with a French baker in New York and has run his own cake business in Scotland.
Colin’s prowess with flour, water, salt and yeast, which emerged as he toured with Badapple in Laurel & Charlie, prompted the Green Hammerton company’s writer-director Kate Bramley to see the potential in writing a play that would combine all his skills.
The result is The Daily Bread, a night of Machiavellian subterfuge, comedy, multiple role-playing, clowning, the aforementioned live baking, banking, and “a little bit of politics”, as Ben Elton was wont to say too often.
The nimble Moncrieff is playing August de Ville, a master baker whose bakery is the talk of the tiny village of Bottledale.
However, could his sumptuous sponges and beautiful buns merely be a facade to throw everyone off the scent that his name is so uncannily similar to that of the newspaper magnate who hid the truth behind the Bottledale bank crash?
About the performer Colin Moncrieff:
Colin, under normal circumstances and when not acting in the more traditional environs of theatre and TV, works part-time as a “therapeutic-clown”, with Hearts & Minds an Edinburgh-based charity, under the guise of Dr. Couscous delightedly engaging with sick-kids and children with multiple, complex needs, and often life-shortening conditions, in hospitals, hospices and special-schools throughout Scotland. However in these more unusual days of Covid-19 he is spending some of his time still as Dr. Couscous, not out in the community but from the comfort his own home in Glasgow’s south-side, creating online-material and visiting kids virtually in their homes through the marvellous medium of the internet; and somewhat more of his time reading the Bhagvad Gita and practicing downward-dogs and warrior-poses as he trains to become a 500-hour Yoga teacher.