Reviews and reflections on Mikron’s work came pouring in as the Government cuts under the Thatcher regime forged ahead:
Manchester-Super-Mare
‘The fast-moving, lively show was a delight even to the jaded palate of a regular theatre-goer like me. The Arts Council are showing a lack of vision that the Victorians would never have understood.’ (The Northampton Chronicle and Echo)
‘The show, in the form of an end-of-pier show, unfolds with a shoestring simplicity that grand master of seaside entertainment, Clarkson Rose, would have envied.’ (Oxford Mail)
’If the Arts Council has seen the company at work, their opinion would have undoubtedly have been different. Mikron’s performances are irresistible…This is an intelligent, imaginative company which genuinely takes theatres to its audiences rarely able to see live entertainment. Many make the claim – few live up to it quite so convincingly as Mikron…’ (Val Jarvin, Huddersfield Examiner)
And finally, the Artful Reporter, the journal of former newspaper North West Arts describes the irony of Mikron’s Arts Council funding cut through a full description of atmosphere during a performance of Still Carrying:
‘It is a Tuesday night in Appley Bridge. Seventy five people and one black Labrador are crammed into the backroom of the local pub to see Still Carrying. The age of the audience ranges from six years to sixty and that includes the dog. People are standing, sitting, squatting. Children are on parents’ knees, apparently allowed in for the duration of the performance only, courtesy of the local PC who turns a ‘blind eye’. In one corner of the room, in a space no larger than six feet by eight feet, the members of the company are preparing to start the show. One stage light on a collapsible stand is the only gesture to technical sophistication. Scenery is two boards propped against the wall. The dressing room is right there on stage… The episodic nature of the piece requires quick changes – slick and executed with the deftness of an impressionist’s switch of persona. The show is punctuated with music and songs… As I left the pub at the end, what stayed in my mind was the picture of a rather plump nine-year-old who had been sitting on one side of me and one of the pub’s older regulars who’d been sitting on the other. Both had chuckled away throughout the evening, both had watched the serious parts with concern, both had clearly had a good time. When the closing song came, the little girl followed the lyrics in her programme with the straw from her coke bottle, the man with a pint of bitter in his hand, and both sang heartily the refrain, ‘Still carrying, still carrying, still carrying on‘. In the circumstances, could there have been a more ironic conclusion to the evening.’
Excerpts taken from I’d Go Back Tomorrow by Mike Lucas (2001:85-87)