Review: HYENAS! (Sugar Butties, GM Fringe)

Monday 11 July 2022
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

The Greater Manchester Fringe is on throughout July at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, as usual, I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

On Monday 11th July, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre to see a double bill from Sugar Butties. In my last review, I talked about The Olive Tree, the first half of that double bill, so now it’s time to turn to the second half, HYENAS! The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 15th July, but here’s the blog version…

Like the first half of this double bill, The Olive Tree, HYENAS! is a one-act, one-woman show. It’s written and performed by Olivia Nicholson, and it’s set on a hen weekend in Spain.

As the show opens, Nicholson walks into the room in a short, sequinned dress, face plastered in makeup, greeting the audience as though we were fellow guests at the party. I can’t remember exactly which song was playing as she entered, but I’m sure you can imagine the soundtrack that was used here. ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ was one of the very evocative numbers used, for instance.

Nicholson plays four characters in HYENAS!, transitioning seamlessly between them. She is Kirsty (the bride-to-be), Lauren (her friend from work), Sarah (a mousy schoolteacher who seems out of her depth with the other hens) and Tasha (who is a bit more cougar than hyena, truth be told). The first character we meet is Lauren, who walks around the room, asking us all how we know the bride-to-be and sharing some little stories of her own.

I’ll get this out of the way now – like The Olive Tree, HYENAS! involves audience participation, and not always of the gentler kind. Nicholson puts audience members on the spot, asking questions like ‘How do you know Kirsty?’ that requires them to improvise a response in front of everyone. At one point, Lauren greets Kirsty, and an audience member has to improvise as an actual character from the play. I have to say, I think this type of audience participation works better in HYENAS! than in The Olive Tree, but that’s because it has a more confrontational style from the off. Unlike the gentle intimacy of Forrest’s confessional storytelling, the hen night setting of HYENAS! immediately evokes the potential for discomfort and tension (playing with the stereotype of such an event).

Initially, Lauren also seems something of a stereotype. Her mode of speech and mannerisms (particularly the way Nicholson mimes her sucking on the straw of her cocktail, which is 100% played for laughs) are exaggerated and caricatured. And while you might be forgiven for thinking that you’ve seen this all before (at first anyway), there are three very good reasons for the exaggeration.

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it allows Nicholson to show off her undoubted talents as a comic performer. While these characters are stereotypes, she captures them beautifully with pitch-perfect timing.

Secondly, the OTT construction of the characters allows the audience to clearly distinguish between the four of them. There are no costume or makeup changes as Nicholson transitions from one character to the next; they’re differentiated by her performance, not by physical appearance. This was done very well – there were no points where Nicholson slipped and, for example, accidentally said a Sarah line in a Lauren voice, or missed a character’s trademark mannerism.

But it’s the third reason that really appealed to me. Of course, none of the characters are, actually, the caricatures we believe them to be. In each case, the brash comedy character is concealing something darker and more painful. This isn’t necessarily unexpected – ‘tears of a clown’ is, after all, a staple of many darkly comedic performances – but it is done well here.

Lauren’s character is an in-your-face mixture of vapidity and rudeness. But another side emerges when she removes herself from the party and goes into the toilets. I won’t spoil anything here, but she has a phone conversation with her husband that goes to a very different place than I was expecting and was surprisingly moving.

Sarah and Tasha also have hidden depths, though Nicholson plays with different ways of revealing these. The character Sarah acts out her secret pain in a flashback that is laugh-out-loud funny – almost farcical – but framed by a hard edge of very real anguish and subtle detail that precedes the flashback, which conjures something really rather unpleasant. Nicholson performs this scene very quickly after Sarah’s first appearance, meaning that the audience’s reaction to her subsequent scenes is always informed by it.

Tasha is presented in a different way. Her backstory – the potential darkness that lies behind her sexually voracious and not particularly pleasant exterior – comes through a rather louche monologue (supposedly a dialogue, though the other participant doesn’t respond) in which she explains her past relationship history. This is very much a story told through implication and hint, and it ends with a somewhat unsettling punchline.

But, as one would expect on a hen weekend, it’s the bride who gets the most attention. Kirsty is even more of a caricature than Lauren at first glance. Her pout, her girly intonation, her repeated refrain of ‘jokes’, her bridezilla demand that everyone wear the same little red dress on a night out all work to convey a character we think we already know.

However, it is probably Kirsty who has the most depth here. Nicholson reveals Kirsty’s backstory in a fragmented, distorted way. We learn early on that her mother has passed away, but later in the play are hints that there is something else, something even darker, to the story. A light-hearted Mr and Mrs quiz, in which the questions (written, fortunately, not improvised) are read out by members of the audience, gives an indication that the groom-to-be might not be the catch Kirsty has been making out. We see more of this later in the play, as Kirsty’s story culminates in a monologue delivered over the top of the karaoke song she’s supposed to be singing. For a play that’s so loud and in-your-face, the amount that’s left unsaid is impressive.

Overall, I really enjoyed HYENAS! And it is a great companion piece to The Olive Tree. The two shows complement each other beautifully. Both use comedy – often physical, parodic or caricatured comedy – to good effect, but the comedy is deceptive. There is real pain behind the laughs in both plays, though The Olive Tree uses its bittersweet narrative style to present pain as a life experience from which one can learn and change, and HYENAS! has a more raw, unhealed pain that screams, rather than cries, behind the laughter.

Like Forrest in The Olive Tree, Nicholson is an assured performer. And while I may not have been entirely comfortable with all the elements of audience participation in the two shows, it should be acknowledged that it’s a mark of two confident and prepared performers that they would risk it!

Ultimately, The Olive Tree and HYENAS! are both plays that get to grips with something about the human condition, though with different styles and tones. I really enjoyed this double bill and I’m looking forward to seeing what Sugar Butties do next. I enjoyed seeing Forrest and Nicholson’s solo pieces, but I think I’d also enjoy seeing them perform together in the future.

HYENAS! was on at the King’s Arms Theatre on 11th and 12th July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: The Olive Tree (Sugar Butties, GM Fringe)

Monday 11 July 2022
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

The Greater Manchester Fringe on throughout the month of July at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, once again, I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

On Monday 11th July, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre to review a double bill from Sugar Butties. I’m going to be reviewing the two pieces separately, so first up is The Olive Tree (written and performed by Jessica Forrest). The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 15th July, but here’s the blog version…

The Olive Tree is a one-act solo show, written and performed by Jessica Forrest. It’s a deeply personal show, using monologue and sketches to present a series of vignettes that are linked by the theme of change (specifically, big life changes).

The show opens with Forrest sitting in a meditative pose on stage. I’m always impressed when actors choose to be on-stage, curtain-up as the audience takes their seats. It must take incredible concentration to remain so still and impassive in the face of the chatter and giggles of the arriving audience.

When the play begins, Forrest begins with an anecdote about seeing a ‘baba’ (a ‘spiritual grandfather’) sitting under a tree. This leads into an off-beat opening monologue about the inauthenticity of many supposed spiritual leaders. Forrest places herself into the monologue, explaining that the show is inspired by a series of life events she’s experienced, which have made her think more about the nature of change.

As I say, the storytelling here uses vignettes, but these are strung together chronologically – much as leaves and fairy lights are strung together behind Forrest as the only set dressing. (The bare stage and lack of dressing makes sense when you know that previous performances of The Olive Tree have been performed outdoors.) Each story is presented with some physical performance – Forrest dons a white dress and fairy wings for one piece, mimes looking after a baby in another, wanders around the stage as though it’s an Italian supermarket elsewhere, and so on.

The first story Forrest tells is about her experience of working as a nanny in London, and it explores and presents the difficult emotions of looking after – and coming to love – a child that isn’t your own. It begins as a rather light-hearted comical piece, including a part where Forrest pulls an audience member up to the stage to play the part of a toddler learning to walk (more on audience participation in a moment). But there’s a bit of a tonal sucker-punch towards the end of the story that gives it a depth and weight beyond the audience’s initial expectations. 

What follows is a more explicitly comedic sequence in which Forrest mimics a wealthy American socialite describing the experience of giving birth and being a new mother. This sequence – performed with increasingly frenetic and sharply parodic tone – offers a contrast to the previous one, but still delivers a bit of a hit as it reaches the climax of its absurdity.

This sense of tonal uncertainty characterizes much of the rest of the show as well, notably in some of the vignettes set after Forrest moved from London to Italy. For instance, she introduces a friend (and the friend’s sense of humour) through a humorous story about being tricked into showing a doctor’s letter to strangers in a supermarket. There’s a faster pace and more physical comedy in this section, but it gives way to a follow-up story, in which we’re told that the friend died a couple of years later.

The audience is able to navigate these emotional shifts – which are, at a couple of points, rather abrupt – because of Forrest’s performance style. She is, at all times, talking directly to the audience. She introduces the play and gives an idea of its content, and the vignettes and anecdotes are all presented in a storytelling style. The intimacy and sense of trust (i.e. the performer trusting the audience) this creates allows for the audience to feel comfortable when darker emotional experiences are evoked. Forrest doesn’t look distressed in telling them – any distress comes in ‘flashbacks’, scenes that are acted out but lack the immediacy of her direct address – so the audience is being encouraged to feel sympathy, but not discomfort. That’s not to say that Forrest doesn’t demonstrate range here, but rather that the piece has a coherence that’s apt for a one-act piece.

Now, I need to say something about audience participation here, as this was something that didn’t work as well as for me.

The promotional material for the play did warn that audience participation would be involved. However, it didn’t really give an indication of the type of audience participation that would be required. This was not a ‘join in if you like’ approach, but rather a direct singling out of individual audience members and expecting them to participate (physically and verbally) in the performance. For me, this didn’t really gel with the overall sense of comfort and trust that Forrest’s storytelling style evoked so well.

Speaking of trust, I mentioned that Forrest conveyed a sense of performer-audience trust that enhanced my enjoyment of the play. I was less sure about the assumption that this would work both ways. Before the play had really begun, Forrest indicated card tags and pencils on the tables in front of us and asked us each to write a personal and private story about change on a tag and give them to her. She assured us that these wouldn’t be read out, but we’d not really been given any reason to trust that assurance. The direct demands of audience participation didn’t inspire me to believe that these stories wouldn’t be used in some way, and the off-beat, somewhat unexpected storytelling style felt at odds with the request to share private information in a room full of strangers. (We were also asked to put glitter on our faces at the end of the performance, which almost all of us did, but I’m not really sure why we were doing it. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the play itself, but who can resist a bit of glitter?)

Uneasy audience participation aside, The Olive Tree was an enjoyable piece of theatre. Forrest is an assured performer, well able to deliver the hard emotional moments of the play in a way that evokes strong sympathies in the audience. Her poised and deceptively gentle storytelling style creates a confessional intimacy that draws the listener in to the quirky and rather unexpected tales of change that make up the play.

If anything, I think The Olive Tree could have been longer – though, admittedly, that’s a big ask of a solo performer! When it came to a close, I felt like I wanted to hear more, and that surely is the mark of a successful performance. But that was the end of the first part of a double-bill, so Forrest prepared to leave the stage, ready for the second half (which will be the subject of my next review).

The Olive Tree is a great piece of Fringe theatre and well worth a watch. It’s moving (but not in an over-the-top manipulative way), funny (in a bittersweet way) and intimate. If you get change to see it at another Fringe festival somewhere this year (like, I don’t know, Edinburgh), I’d definitely recommend you see it.

The Olive Tree was on at the King’s Arms Theatre on 11th and 12th July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Time and Again Theatre Company, GM Fringe)

Friday 8 July 2022
International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Greater Manchester Fringe is on throughout the month of July at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, once again, I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

On Friday 8th July, I was at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to review A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a performance by Time and Again Theatre Company. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 15th July, but here’s the blog version…

Time and Again’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in the 1980s. The production opens on a set featuring a wall of fencing covered in ‘period’ posters – some pop culture (concert and album posters), some political (class conflict, the Miners Strike and women’s rights loom large). As the audience take their seats, 1980s pop music plays – and, indeed, this is the music that will form the soundtrack to what we are about to watch.

The play begins with members of the cast arriving, placards waving, to push against the fence and shout slogans associated with the Miners Strike and other industrial actions of the mid-1980s. This might seem like an odd way to start an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it does work – and I’ll come back to why shortly. (I will just say, it should probably be described as a 1980s ‘vibe’ rather than ‘setting’, as it is irreverently anachronistic, with period details, costume and music being taken from the entire decade, even when that doesn’t make any sense – Puck probably shouldn’t be playing on a Gameboy next to some striking miners. But Shakespeare’s plays are always irreverently anachronistic, aren’t they?)

Although I’ve called this an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, it’s probably more accurate to call it a ‘production with idiosyncratic staging’. As an aside I’d just say that I’ve never actually seen a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that didn’t have idiosyncratic staging (I’ve seen performances in forests, in weirdly urban settings, in different time periods) – of all Shakespeare’s plays, it is the one that most lends itself to quirky inventiveness. The text as written (as it has survived) is pretty quirky itself: set as it is in Athens, but with a distinctly English flavour (not least in the use of herbs and flowers that are definitely more Warwickshire than Athens), and featuring a set of fairies that are one part folklore, one part Classical myth.

So, despite the set-dressing and soundtrack, in many ways we’re on solid ground with Time and Again’s production. Any Shakespeare purists in the audience will no doubt be reassured by the arrival of Theseus (Samantha Vaughan) and Hippolyta (Keziah Lockwood), who are preparing for the wedding, followed by Egeus (Sammy Wells) and his disobedient daughter Hermia (Tabitha Hughes) who introduce the love quadrangle that forms the ‘aristocratic humans’ part of the plot.

There are some nice touches here. Vaughan’s Theseus is played as a lofty but jovial landowning duke – dressed in country attire ready for a day of shooting. Hughes’s (a little bit spoilt, a little bit naïve) Hermia is styled in a two-piece, cinched waist blazer and matching pencil skirt, accessorized with chunky accessories and de rigeur little shoulder bag. With the arrival of the other ‘aristocratic humans’, this aesthetic is enhanced. Demetrius (Anthony Morris) is a Yuppie in red braces, and poor old Helena (Jessica Ayres) matches Hermia’s fashion choices, but in a slightly more muted, more conservative way.

Time and Again offer some innovation with their Lysander (played Leah Taylor), who is a woman, which offers some implicit motivation for Egeus’s refusal to allow Hermia to marry Lysander. Nevertheless, this isn’t explicitly stated. The production uses Shakespeare’s text pretty much as written, but switches pronouns for Lysander. Taylor’s Lysander is a bit swaggering and a bit punk on first glance – shorts, big black boots, a ‘Frankie Says Relax’ t-shirt under a black blazer. Of course, Lysander is essentially the same class as Hermia, Helena and Demetrius, so this is really just show. I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, but I certainly enjoyed the fact that Lysander’s t-shirt wasn’t an official Frankie Goes to Hollywood t-shirt (which, to be geeky, have ‘Frankie Say Relax’ on them), as it chimed with Taylor’s performance of Lysander as a bit of a show-off who might have more in common with Demetrius than she’s letting on.

I’ve called these characters the ‘aristocratic humans’, because, of course, they are intended to contrast with the ‘lower class humans’. The ‘Rude Mechanicals’ of Shakespeare’s play are, here, a group of striking miners who first appear on stage singing ‘Solidarity Forever’, before settling down to rehearse their play, Pyramus and Thisbe, which will be performed at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Now, it might seem nonsensical that a group of strikers would be preparing a performance to entertain a duke, but this is where the 1980s setting becomes more than just an aesthetic. As Time and Again themselves point out in the Directors’ Note for the production, the 1980s in Britain were characterized by industrial action, but also by mass celebrations for royal weddings and royal babies. The class system in Britain is a weird thing, and it’s oddly easy to imagine politically charged protestors pausing their chants of ‘Maggie Out!’ to show a little bit of deference to an aristocrat’s nuptials. After all, didn’t we all recently halt our cries of ‘Boris Out!’ to have a lovely Jubilee afternoon tea and wish Her Majesty well?

The Rude Mechanicals are very much the rough comic relief of the play. Hassan Javed’s Snug (who is Pyramus and Thisbe’s lion) is endearingly daft; Catherine Cowdrey plays Starveling (who will use a lantern to represent ‘moonlight’ in the play-with-the-play) almost like a character from a Victoria Wood sketch; and Adam Martin-Brooks’s Francis Flute appears to be the only to remember there is a class war going on (albeit a slightly woolly one), sneaking an interjection of ‘fascist!’ into his big death scene in Pyramus and Thisbe.

Of course, the scene-stealer in this regard is Nick Bottom (Tim Cooper). Cooper is enjoyably OTT in his initial appearance, capturing the ridiculousness of the character – Bottom, after all, is a bit of an ass even before his transformation. Cooper hams up the initial appearance of Bottom to perfection, making increasingly bizarre requests of the long-suffering Peter Quince (Kieran Palmer), and his transformation is handled with excellent comic timing. Nevertheless, Cooper is also well able to handle the small moments of pathos. His confusion at his friends’ fear on seeing his transformed appearance (which, in this performance, involves a neon pink hardhat with wiry donkey ears and a pair of aviator glasses) gives way to tangible dejection, and there is a very brief, but rather moving, moment after he is changed back into human form that makes us feel real pity for the man’s isolation.

But… this is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so as you might expect, the fairies are the stars of the show. And then some!

In case you were still wondering if the 1980s theme was a reasonable creative choice, I will say that I can’t think of more appropriate entrance music for Oberon than Adam Ant’s ‘Prince Charming’. It captured the style and tone of Time and Again’s fairy world perfectly.

Oberon and Titania were doubled with Theseus and Hippolyta, with Vaughan and Lockwood playing the two couples. Lockwood’s Titania is a sweeter and gentler version of the fairy queen than I’ve seen before, and the meanness of the trick Oberon plays on her is thrown into sharp focus by the sense of vulnerability that comes through Lockwood’s performance. Her retinue of fairies are doubled with the Rude Mechanicals, with Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed and Moth tripping onto the stage in more ways than one (if you know what I mean). I particularly enjoyed Cowdrey’s Mustardseed, who I think I last met in a field at Glastonbury (I think there might have been some mushrooms growing on that bank where the wild thyme grows…) and Javed’s Moth, whose military style jacket and comical ‘foot soldier’ air reminds us that Shakespeare’s fairies grew out of a literary tradition in which the fairy king came with a retinue that was armed and dangerous. There is no menace, though, in Titania’s band. That is very much the preserve of her spouse.

Vaughan’s Oberon is just wonderful. In a production full of excellent performances, it’s hard to point to a standout, but I was mesmerized by the fairy king. Oberon is visually arresting – dressed in black, with a black-and-white ruff and New Romantic-inspired make up, he looks like a monochrome Harlequin – but Vaughan’s performance really made the part. Veering between menacing and whimsical, megalomaniacal and romantic, Oberon is a force of nature here, demanding the audience’s attention each time he appears.

He is, however, almost upstaged on occasion by his companion. Ty Mather’s Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow) captures the idea of ‘impishness’ in all its glory. Playful at times, but downright worrying at others, Puck dances around the human characters with a glee that is a lot of fun to watch. However, Mather also imbues their Puck with more of a commanding presence than is often the case, reminding us that this is the king’s second-in-command after all. And while we are watching Puck, the fairy is also watching us. Mather’s Puck appears to be very aware of the audience, stopping just short of direct interaction, which (of course) prepares us nicely for Puck’s role in the play’s ending.

Overall, as this review should clearly have shown, this is an excellent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yes – it has an idiosyncratic setting. But it also feels incredibly authentic and true to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play (I think I’m right in saying that William Shakespeare was not familiar with the song ‘Safety Dance’ by Men Without Hats, but if he had been, we can surely all agree he would have had the Rude Mechanicals dance to it at the end of Pyramus and Thisbe).

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is undoubtedly one of Shakespeare’s more unequivocally joyful plays. While there are academic arguments that can be made about its theme and construction, a performance of this play should, above all else, be fun. And Time and Again’s production is filled to the brim with jouissance and affection. Sometimes, characters seem to be in real danger – Titania and Bottom are both rather vulnerable, and Hermia and Helena are put through the ringer by both the aristocratic humans and the fairies – but it’s just a bit of fun in the end. When Puck addresses the audience at the play’s conclusion, telling us that no harm was meant by the play, and that if we’re offended by what we’ve seen, we should just imagine that it was all a dream, the strains of Human League’s ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ begins to play. The cast dance together, and the audience sings along, breaking down the boundaries between performer and spectator and creating a sense of communal joy that was really quite powerful.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was on for one night only at the Greater Manchester Fringe, though the company have performed it at other venues previously. If you get chance to see it in the future, this one is a very strong recommendation from me.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was on at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 8th July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: The Story of the Tower (Hirai-Kikaku and Media Kobo, C ARTS, GM Fringe)

July 2022
Digital Event

The Greater Manchester Fringe runs throughout July, with performances at various venues around Greater Manchester and online. Once again, I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

The next show I saw this year was a digital production, and it was part of the C ARTS strand on this year’s Fringe programme. C ARTS is a curated independent arts programme that delivers work for the Edinburgh Fringe, which is then made available online via streaming throughout the year. Although produced for the Edinburgh Fringe, C ARTS productions are now included on the programmes of other fringe festivals, such as Brighton Fringe and – more importantly for today’s post – the Greater Manchester Fringe.

The production I’m going to be reviewing now was originally produced for the 2021 Edinburgh Fringe, but it’s available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing The Story of the Tower, a short film installation from Hirai-Kikaku and Media Kobo. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 8th July, but here’s the blog version…

The Story of the Tower begins with a shot of a railway station in Tokyo, with ambient sounds playing. A voiceover (Mitsuko Hirai) greets us (admittedly greets us as though we’re in Edinburgh in August 2021!) and encourages us to relax and get ready for the show. A little bit of background information is given, explaining that three stories will be told and that these will be in Japanese, English and broken, mistranslated English. The Japanese story, we’re told, will be ‘One Arm’ by Yasunari Kawabata, and a brief plot synopsis is offered for those who don’t speak Japanese or who haven’t read the English translation of this story.

And then the camera begins to move. The audience is invited to travel with the disembodied voice, from the station to the theatre where the performance will take place, and to enjoy the sounds of a shopping street in Tokyo along the way. It’s a strange experience – the camera is steady, and the pace of movement is measured (as though we’re ambling, not speeding through the city street). It’s almost hypnotic. But there are also some little details in the street – the snippets of sound, the way the bodies of passers-by move in and out of shot at awkward accidental angles, the quiet voyeurism of the disembodied point-of-view, the shop signs that are a jumble of Japanese, English and mistranslated English (one or two being hard to parse for a native English speaker) – that anticipate the style and concerns of the production proper.

And then we enter a ‘theatre’ (which appears more like a basement room in a rather nondescript office) and the physical performance begins.

A lone performer (Yoshiko Imamura, who also choreographed the piece) stands against a plain wall holding an arm towards her face. Another arm appears, covered with a long glove. As the performance unfolds, chromakeying is used to project – or more accurately to layer – a set of images onto the glove, the wall and (eventually) the body of Imamura (filming is by Rob Moreno). The images are of arms and faces, which interact (it looks like they touch, caress and hold) the ‘live’ body of the performer. All the while, Hirai reads from Kawabata’s story, the audio forming another layer to the performance.

This sequence is hypnotic – though in a different way to the pre-show sequence on the street. The effect of the layering of images in the film results in Imamura’s body becoming fragmented, incoherent at times. It is often difficult to understand what ‘shape’ the performer’s body has, as it is distorted by the multiple limbs that are superimposed through the filming. At a number of points, I was surprised to find that the hand I had assumed was Imamura’s was actually part of the projected film.

And a similar effect is created with the audio. Although Hirai begins by telling the story as though she is reading it quietly, the voiceover also becomes layered, with echoes and whispers added to create a subtle sense of polyphony that augments the polymorphous visuals. This is both unsettling and mesmeric, and I would say the effect was heightened by the fact that I don’t understand Japanese (I think I picked out one single word from the voiceover, but that was ‘arigato’ so I’m not sure that’s a huge achievement from me!), and this heightened the uncanniness of the sequence. Hirai’s voiceover was recognizable and familiar as storytelling, but unfamiliar because of the language barrier; in the same way, Imamura’s body was recognizable and familiar as a human body, but also unfamiliar because of the movement of both the performer and the layering of other limbs and body parts.

From here, the piece moves into another story. This time it’s ‘The Black Tower’ by Mimei Ogawa, which is told in English. Again, Imamura offers a wordless physical performance, with images projected on and around her. In this sequence, it’s not so much the physical body that is fragmented and distorted through the layered images, but rather a sense of framing and staging.

The other effect created by placing these sequences together is a distortion – or an undermining – of narrative structure. While both ‘One Arm’ and ‘The Black Tower’ are narratives (though as magic realism and fairy tale respectively, they may not be the most logical of stories), The Story of the Tower turns them into fragments and layers them together in a way that unsettles narrative coherence. The drive for audience members to make connections between the two stories or to link them in terms of theme or plot is consistently thwarted and – in places – the stories dissolve into a sea of words.

And this is where the piece’s underlying influence becomes apparent. As the introductory sequence tells us, The Story of the Tower is inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. The final sequence, in which a recording of an automated transcription of the breaking news of the destruction of the Twin Towers plays (in occasionally broken or slightly awkward English) over Imamura’s performance and the layered visuals that take us backwards through the Tokyo street scene we experienced at the beginning, brings everything together in a way that – for all its incoherence and uncanniness – does make sense. Again, the piece plays with the effect of defamiliarization: the measured walk through the city street from earlier becomes unfamiliar – almost uncomfortable – as it plays in reverse, in black-and-white, with the physical presence of the performer appearing to step in and out of the film.

The Story of the Tower is a strange and immersive piece. It’s visually hypnotic, but it also has a wonderfully disconcerting soundscape that compliments the physical performances. It encourages the audience to think about communication and its breakdown – as is clear from the reference to the Tower of Babel – but also about the construction of narrative and the coherence of form in physical performance and storytelling.

Overall, I would definitely recommend you check out The Story of the Tower (and I’d also recommend you watch it with headphones, so you can get the most out of the audio elements). It’s strange, compelling and challenging, and it’s unsettling in all the right ways.

The Story of the Tower is available to stream throughout the month of July, as part of the C ARTS strand on this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe programme. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: Pill (Blue Balloon Theatre, GM Fringe)

Friday 1st July 2022
Salford Arts Theatre

The Greater Manchester Fringe is back for another year. The festival started on 1st July, and runs throughout the month at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, once again, I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

Like last year, my festival started at the Salford Arts Theatre (which you might remember from previous years is one of my favourite venues). On Friday 1st July, I was there to review Pill, a theatre performance from Blue Balloon Theatre. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 8th July, but here’s the blog version…

Pill is written and performed by Rebecca Phythian. It’s an autobiographical one-act play, told through monologues and physical performance by Phythian, who is joined on stage by Adam Martyn who takes on the dual roles of Doctor and Boyfriend. After the performance, there was a Q&A with Phythian and Martyn as well.

The ‘pill’ of the play’s title is the contraceptive pill, and the play explores Phythian’s experiences, after being prescribed the combined pill at nineteen, of side effects that damaged her mental and physical health, as well as the difficulties she faced when trying to get help and support for these.

In her expository monologues, Phythian gives a potted account of how she came to be prescribed oral contraception and how quickly she started to experience side effects. It’s tempting to say here that she gives an account of how she chose to be on oral contraception, as technically this is a medication of choice. However, as the play makes clear from the start, this is – particularly for young women – not always an informed choice. The combined factors of pressure from a boyfriend and lack of clear guidance on side effects of the pill are stated bluntly in the early part of the play. Phythian’s matter-of-fact delivery of this encourages members of the audience (many of whom will have been in the same position) to relate.

While there is a little bit of background given as to the history and pharmacology of the pill, this is only offered as context. The real meat of the performance lies in Phythian’s re-enactment of the spiralling descent into depression and reduced libido, and fear of high blood pressure, weight gain and blood clots.

The standout scene that encapsulates this focus comes in the middle of the play. Martyn plays the Doctor, sitting behind a desk and laptop. Phythian plays herself, re-enacting an appointment with her GP in which she asked for help or advice with the side effects she was experiencing. The Doctor responds only to questions about which brand of combined pill she is taking, and whether she should be prescribed a different brand. The issue of the depression Phythian is experiencing is only addressed in a cursory fashion, with a refusal to prescribe anti-depressants as they’re deemed ‘unnecessary’ and a request that she continues the counselling.

But the scene is then replayed – this time, Phythian’s body language and demeanour is different, more visibly anxious and with a creeping sense of desperation. Martyn’s performance remains the same, his responses repeated word-for-word and his body language unchanged.

And then the scene is replayed – again and again – with Phythian becoming more desperate, angry at times, beseeching at others. Her words and tone change over the repetitions, like a crescendo of frustration at not being listened to. Martyn does not change, remaining impassive and unmoved by the increasingly worrying descriptions of Phythian’s state of mind. There’s a painful irony, as Martyn’s repeated explanation of why anti-depressants aren’t necessary includes the line, ‘You’re making eye contact with me’, when he himself rarely looks up from his laptop.

From here, Phythian explores some of the social side effects – such as a deterioration in her relationship (with Martyn returning to play a bemused boyfriend struggling to offer sympathy and support), and the pressure of dealing with a set of side effects – and, sadly, I’m not going to call them ‘severe’ side effects, as Phythian is really only focusing on the common or expected side effects of oral contraception (weight gain, mood shifts, loss of libido); ‘severe’ side effects are blood clots, stroke and death – that are continually brushed under the carpet.

While Pill is an autobiographical piece, it is also a provocative one. It is clear throughout that the intention is to provoke conversation. It’s true, there may be members of the audience who think that these side effects are all known quantities – perhaps they did have it all explained to them by a GP when they were first prescribed, or perhaps they made the choice not to take oral contraception in the first place – the point that is made very clearly and forcefully through the performances here is that so many people don’t know the risks. Or don’t feel able to weigh up risk against benefit in a meaningful way. Pill asks the question of how this can be addressed. How can we talk about this more?

The climactic moment of the play comes when Phythian strips her outerwear off to reveal words written across her body in black marker pen – ‘weight loss’, ‘weight gain’, ‘depression’, ‘high blood pressure’, etc. It’s an unambiguous visual metaphor, and it was clear from the Q&A afterwards that it was one that resonated with the audience.

For me, the real strength of Pill lay in the performances. Phythian is assured in her performance, conveying the desperation, frustration and anger with a compelling mixture of confrontation and vulnerability. She is believable and relatable, and it’s almost possible to believe some of the monologues are off-the-cuff, conversation starters (rather than a carefully scripted performance). When she addresses the audience, visibly tense and frightened, with words written across her body, it’s incredibly moving. As an older woman in the audience, I felt almost protective towards the woman before me on the stage – and this is part of the show’s intention. Again, how can we talk about this more? What role do we play, and what responsibility do we have towards younger generations of women (and, as an audience member pointed out in the Q&A, to trans men, transmasculine and nonbinary people)?

Overall, then, this was a strong start to the festival for me. Excellent performances, a well-written script, and a provocative subject matter made for a very thought-provoking play. I hope to see Pill develop further, as Phythian hinted at some future plans in the Q&A after the show. I’ll be watching with interest for these!

Pill was on at Salford Arts Theatre on 1st and 2nd July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. It will also be on at the Fuse International Festival in London on 8th July. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: Sandy (Peripeteia Theatre Company, GM Fringe)

Wednesday 29th September 2021
Salford Arts Theatre

The Greater Manchester Fringe ran throughout September. I’ve been reviewing shows from this year’s festival programme for this blog and for North Manchester FM. The final show I saw at this year’s Fringe was Sandy by Peripeteia Theatre Company at Salford Arts Theatre. The radio version of my review will be broadcast on this Saturday’s Hannah’s Bookshelf, but here’s the blog version…

The marketing information for Sandy was a bit circumspect, and so I went into this show with very few expectations. I knew it would be a ‘two-hander’, and I knew it would touch on the themes of femininity and womanhood. I also knew that the play would involve an inanimate object having thoughts and feelings, though I didn’t know how this would be presented on stage. Given the image of a lipstick on the play’s poster, I put all this together and came to… completely the wrong conclusion!

Written by Anna Pellegrini and directed by Adam Cachia, Sandy is a one-act play that packs a real punch. It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the hardest-hitting of the shows I saw at this year’s festival, and some scenes were pretty uncomfortable to watch. This is most definitely not a criticism – the play confounded what expectations I did have, and it’s a piece of theatre that will certainly stick with me for a while.

The play begins with a single figure, sitting with her (it does appear to be a female figure) back to the audience. She is motionless as the audience arrive, and we can see only the back of her long curly hair and a body shrouded in what looks like a hairdresser’s cape or something similar. The lights go down, and the figure on stage begins to speak, attempting to make sense of the things around her – for instance, a face is described in terms of a series of abstract shapes – and the space in which she finds herself.

The play’s opening is slow and unsettling. We have only small clues to help us parse the details that we see and hear. The figure on stage – who will eventually become known as Sandy – is played by Juliet Daalder, and her opening monologue is performed static on a chair with her body covered. There is something uncomfortable about Daalder’s performance, taking us tentatively into the uncanny valley, a place we’ll explore more as the play develops.

Now, I have seen another review of Sandy that resolutely refuses to give any spoilers about what is revealed on stage. I’ve taken the decision to be more direct in my review, partly because I’m not giving away any details that aren’t easy to find on the company’s social media, and also because I don’t think these details spoil the play. Nevertheless, I will remind you that I went into the play with uncertain expectations – if you want to have the same experience, then don’t read the rest of this review! Just take my word for it that this is an excellent piece of Fringe theatre that you should check out if you can!

So, for those of you who have stayed…

When the other performer, Hannah MacDonald, enters, the audience is able to start making sense of what they’re seeing – though this is a truly discomforting revelation. Daalder’s ‘character’ (if that’s the right term) is a sex doll. MacDonald plays an unnamed woman who has purchased the doll for her partner in an attempt to appease him and rekindle their relationship.

What follows is the promised ‘two-hander’, in which a triangle of relationships is played out through suggestion, implication and reaction. Through MacDonald’s monologues (even though she is often speaking towards Daalder’s character, it’s hard to describe this as a dialogue, as the two characters don’t always hear or respond to one another) and through her physical performance and mannerisms, we learn of the relationship this nameless woman has with her partner. The picture that’s painted is not a pretty one, and the audience intuit abuse, manipulation and the constant undermining of the woman’s self-esteem. MacDonald performs this with a brittle, almost abrasive, quality, creating a character driven as much by anger as by self-pity and sadness.

We also see Daalder’s doll’s relationship to the woman’s partner. In many ways, this is more raw than the nameless woman’s story. Told mostly in the aftermath of – shall we say? – encounters, there is a brutality to this part of the triangle that is really quite hard to watch. Daalder performs this with a powerful sense of physicality – and more on that shortly. It is because of the brutality and discomfort in these scenes that I’m loath to call her by the name given in the title. ‘Sandy’ is a name bestowed on the doll by the man (who, by the way, we don’t ever see or hear on stage). Such is the power of the scene in which this is explained that I actually feel uncomfortable calling the doll Sandy.

The third relationship presented is, in many ways, the one the audience is most invested in, and yet it is also the hardest one to understand. Much of the play’s focus is on the relationship between the nameless woman and the doll. The doll is hopeful when she’s purchased by the woman, and she imagines that they might be friends. Initially, the woman sees the doll as just that, brushing her hair and remembering the dolls she played with as a child. Each sees the other as ‘perfect’, but while this is a source of love for the doll, it becomes the site of resentment and bitterness for the woman.

At turns heart-breaking, shocking and frustrating, the woman’s relationship to the doll is what sticks in the mind after watching Sandy. Pellegrini’s script offers a really original idea, and the way in which the two characters talk at each other, rather than to each other, only very occasionally seeming to hear and understand one another, is very well-done. Cachia’s direction really adds to this, with the physical interactions between the two characters veering from intimate to detached (violent, even) in a way that is convincing but disturbing.

I have to give praise to the performances here, though. Daalder is captivating as the doll. Through her physical movement, facial expressions and speech patterns, she is a doll. As I say, this really is a trip to the uncanny valley – we know the actor is a human, but she is so doll-like at times that it’s hard to keep hold of that. One scene in particular, where the placement of Daalder’s limbs signals the aftermath of something unspoken but still somehow explicit, is particularly unsettling.

MacDonald’s performance takes us in the opposite direction. She begins as the human to Daalder’s non-human, but this binary is soon unsettled through the performance. MacDonald captures the disintegration of a personality with subtlety and depth. Neither one of the characters we see on stage can truly be called human.

As should be clear from this review, this is a strong recommendation from me! Sandy was the final play I saw at this year’s festival, but what a place to end! It’s interesting to compare it to where I started at the beginning of the month. The first play I saw was Eleanor May Blackburn’s Subdural Hematoma, a one-woman show that deals, in part, with a process of rehumanization. As I said in my review of Blackburn’s show, Subdural Hematoma includes sequences in which Blackburn deindividualizes herself through the use of a blank face mask, which I referred to as ‘uncanny’ and an ‘in between state’. I was reminded of this when I saw Sandy (and, of course, I was back at the Salford Arts Theatre, where the festival began for me), as it felt like something of a reversal. Although ostensibly Sandy presents an inanimate object with human thoughts and feelings, it’s actually a sustained exploration of dehumanization. Daalder’s doll isn’t really a person, but then neither is MacDonald’s woman.

Overall, Sandy was an exciting, thought-provoking and truly disquieting way to end this year’s Fringe festival. I don’t know if Peripeteia Theatre Company have plans to perform Sandy again elsewhere, but if you do get the chance to see it, I recommend you do so.

Sandy was on at Salford Arts Theatre on 29th and 30th September, as part of this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe. For more information about the Greater Manchester Fringe, please visit the festival’s website.

Review: The Formidable Lizzie Boone (Selina Helliwell, GM Fringe)

Friday 24th September 2021
International Anthony Burgess Foundation

The Greater Manchester Fringe continues throughout September. I still have a couple of shows left to review on this year’s programme. I’ll be reviewing shows on this blog, and also for North Manchester FM. The next show I saw was The Formidable Lizzie Boone, by Selina Helliwell, which I saw at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on Friday 24th September. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on my Hannah’s Bookshelf Greater Manchester Fringe Reviews Special on Tuesday 28th September, but here’s the blog version…

The Formidable Lizzie Boone is a one-woman (almost) show, written and performed by Selina Helliwell and directed by Hannah Heaton. It follows a format quite familiar to the Fringe, in which a slightly awkward, slightly confrontational, but always rather likeable young woman speaks directly to the audience about the things in her life that have made her… well… slightly awkward and confrontational. In this case, our titular protagonist is ostensibly speaking to her therapist, so her explanations have a clinical as well as confessional context.

Lizzie (played by Helliwell) is, in many ways, just an ordinary girl. And, given some of the details of her story, that’s actually quite a tragic thing to say. Picked on at primary school and bullied at secondary school, Lizzie enters early adulthood with no self-esteem and few real friends – it’s a story I imagine many people in the audience will sadly relate to. Although she worries that she’s a ‘psychopath’ (a bombshell dropped early in the performance), the catalogue of behaviours, relationships and mistakes we see unfold on stage are depressingly normal. For all Lizzie’s conviction that there is something horribly different and shocking about her personality, Helliwell’s character emerges as a kinds of millennial everywoman, and the reaction of the audience to some of her revelations certainly seemed to confirm this.

Helliwell presents Lizzie’s story mostly through monologue, with a bare set containing just a single chair. The pressure is on, then, to engage the audience directly for an entire hour, but fortunately Helliwell is well up to the challenge. Although we see her talking to her therapist Marie (played by Carla Kayani-Lawman – more on that shortly), Lizzie repeatedly breaks off from what she is saying to talk directly to the audience, explaining her feelings towards Marie, how she is not necessarily answering her questions fully, and explaining the background to the issues for which she is seeking therapy.

Helliwell is at ease with the audience – even when her verbal performance moves to the physical in a burlesque dance sequence midway through the play – and her conversational style is one of the reasons why Lizzie Boone is such a likable character for all her flaws. Though her interactions with Marie are hesitant and sometimes forced, her address to the audience is natural and unguarded. Helliwell does a good job of creating this balance, allowing the audience to warm to her character to pave the way for a jubilant and celebratory ending.

While I’ve said that Marie is played by Kayani-Lawman, it should be noted that this is an off-stage performance. Helliwell is the only performer that we see on stage. Other characters are performed through recorded voiceovers, to which Helliwell responds, often adding additional descriptive details that allow us to picture the individuals and better understand their relationship to the protagonist-narrator (whether all of the descriptions are flattering or neutral… well… no one said this wasn’t a highly subjective piece!). Through these voiceovers, we learn of Lizzie’s relationship to the various men in her life and her past, including Robin (voiced by Christopher Sutcliffe), a recent boyfriend with whom Lizzie has had a disagreement, Rick (voiced by Adrian Stretton), an unpleasant ex, Paul (voiced by Rodney Gooden), a platonic friend who responded badly to learning about the details of Lizzie’s sex life, and Mr Paxam (also voiced by Gooden), a P.E. teacher at Lizzie’s sixth form college.

It is this last character who provides some of the more unpleasant content in the show (though Rick comes a close second in many ways). As the content warnings for the show indicate, one of the issues Lizzie has been struggling with is the emotional aftermath of a sexual assault when she was at college. Helliwell takes the bold decision to enact some parts of this on stage, coupled with a voiceover of the aggressor. Bold as it may be, it’s a very astute decision, as it subtly embodies the reality of living with the aftereffects of a traumatic experience. What the audience sees is Lizzie enacting the abuse on herself (it is, after all, Helliwell’s own hands that are performing as Mr Paxam’s), while the voice of her assailant echoes around her. It was uncomfortable to watch, but very cleverly staged.

On a lighter – and much more hopeful note – there is another voiceover that plays a different role in Lizzie’s story. Mary Taylor voices Debz (with a ‘z’ not an ‘s’), Lizzie’s closest – only – friend. On her first audio appearance, Debz appears to be the polar opposite of Lizzie. She’s married with a child, plus brasher and more self-confident. The pair seem to have little in common, and we later learn that they met quite by chance when their respective workplaces held their Christmas parties at the same venue.

At times, it’s easy to get infuriated with Debz, who seems to be ignoring her friend’s anxieties and problems in favour of her own lascivious fantasies of adultery. However, there is more to Debz – and more to her friendship with Lizzie – than we first realize. I really enjoyed the way Lizzie and Debz’s friendship was evoked through suggestion and implication, which was often at odds with the way Lizzie bluntly described it. There is an unexpected warmth to this portrayal of a mismatched, but ultimately very strong, female friendship, and despite the fact that Debz initially appears to be introduced for comic relief, I found myself wanting to see more of this pair of friends. I would happily watch a Lizzie-and-Debz sequel to The Formidable Lizzie Boone!

(As an aside, Helliwell’s other production at this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe, Fruit Salad tells the story of a mismatched pair of friends, Cherry and Peaches (played by Taylor and Helliwell), who meet by chance but develop an ‘unlikely but beautiful friendship’. Clearly, this is a theme that Helliwell is drawn to in her writing, and it’s an interesting and thought-provoking one.)

To return to The Formidable Lizzie Boone, what Helliwell ultimately offers audiences here is a well-drawn character sketch of a troubled, but far from hopeless, young woman on the verge of discovering who she really is. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Lizzie Boone isn’t a psychopath, but she is a character who is struggling to understand her own personality and identity. The audience comes to know Lizzie as she comes to know herself, allowing us to share her sense of hope and celebration at the ending.

Once again, the Fringe has offered a well-written and well-performed solo show – continuing my soft spot for this type of performance! Helliwell’s writing reveals a knack for capturing something about the mundane and ordinary business of human interactions (even interactions of an unpleasant nature) and elevating it to a poetic, imaginative and compelling stage performance. This is another writer who I think is one to watch in the future.

The Formidable Lizzie Boone was on at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 24th and 25th September, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. For more information about this year’s festival programme, please visit the Greater Manchester Fringe website.

Review of Feeling Haunted (Psycho Garbage, GM Fringe)

Sunday 19th September 2021
Chapeltown Picture House, Cheetham Hill

The Greater Manchester Fringe Festival is on at multiple venues across the region throughout September. I’m reviewing a selection of the shows for this blog and for North Manchester FM. The next show I saw was Feeling Haunted by emerging theatre company Psycho Garbage, which was on at the Chapeltown Picture House in Cheetham Hill on Sunday 19th September. My radio review of this production will be broadcast on Tuesday’s Hannah’s Bookshelf GM Fringe Reviews Special, but here’s the blog version…

Before I start on the review of the show, I’d just like to mention the venue. This was my first visit to the Chapeltown Picture House, and it certainly won’t be my last. Chapeltown Picture House is a cinema and performance space housed in Grub in the Redbank area of Cheetham Hill. Although I’ve passed Grub a few times, I’ve never been in. I had no idea it was such a big place, or that it was home to such an incredible cinema/theatre space. The venue has a great atmosphere, and it’s comfortable and spacious enough to let you relax and lose yourself in whatever you’re watching. I can’t wait to see a film there!

And so… onto Feeling Haunted…

The play is a spoof episode of a fictional TV show of the same name. It’s set up as a ‘lost episode’ being shown on the Horror Channel, but don’t let that mislead you. This is a comedy, rather than a horror.

Feeling Haunted (i.e. the fictional TV show) is a ghost-hunting show, hosted by David G. Hostmann (played by Dylan Hopkins) with his sidekick cameraman Terry F.Y. (played by Jacob Lee Normansell). I probably don’t need to explain the influences here, as Feeling Haunted is closely modelled on the material it spoofs, even down to the studio-based talking head interviews that punctuate the action.

This ‘lost episode’ sees the Feeling Haunted team responding to a case of ghostly activity at Oak House, a rambling old property owned by the elderly Darlene Sweetly (played by Leah Mulchay) who has a supply of Capri-Suns and a soft spot for David Hostmann. As appears to be the format of the show, the hosts call for assistance from psychic Galina Pakulska (played by Dominika Rak), and then things get a little bit silly.

There is a lot to like about Feeling Haunted. While the material they use is probably not the most original – there have been countless other spoofs of the ghost-hunter TV format, and the fake adverts that are included in the show are well-trodden territory (for instance, a parody of the Cillit Bang advert that was, always, beyond parody anyway), the company present it with an enjoyable verve and energy. Hopkins revels in his performance as a borderline-OTT trenchcoated American presenter, though he gets to reveal a little more of his Welsh roots when he doubles-up as one of the previous residents of the house that we see via intercut VT. And Normansell is charming – and surprisingly convincing – as the cameraman Terry, particularly with his ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ catchphrase whenever paranormal activity is noted.

Mulchay carries much of the physical comedy in her performance of sometimes-sweet, sometimes worryingly lascivious elderly homeowner. Again, there’s an exuberance to the performance that is hard not to enjoy, but Mulchay will also give us an indication of her wider range later in show (and I’m not going to give any spoilers for that!).

I don’t know if this is a matter of personal taste, but I particularly enjoyed Rak’s turn as the flamboyant psychic Galina. She hams up the clichéd elements of the character to just the right extent, but also undercuts the stereotype with barbed asides, including a commentary on the running joke that Hostmann and Terry can’t pronounce her name correctly (in fact, they mangle it to the point of calling her ‘Garlic Bread’ and ‘Gar Gar Binks’ towards the end).

Although the set-up to the show is pretty straightforward, there’s also an ambition to the performance that is executed with style and flair. The use of pre-recorded video projected onto the Chapeltown Picture House’s cinema screen is well-done. The show’s opening credits are shown in this way, as are the spoof adverts I mentioned earlier. The interaction between the recorded segments and the live action on stage is smooth and assured, and it allows for more depth to both the comedy and the plot.

And there is a plot here – for all the silly shenanigans of spilt Capri-Sun and body-swapping séances – and it isn’t quite the plot you might be expecting. Those VT talking heads that I mentioned take on an additional resonance as the audience gradually realize that they are watching clues that will help them, alongside the Feeling Haunted team, solve the mystery of what is going on at Oak House.

That’s not to say that this a mystery in the Agatha Christie sense, but there is undoubtedly another, more animated, pop culture influence underlying the spooky daftness (or daft spookiness). I had a bit of a chuckle as it dawned on me where we were going, before a final line from one character (again, no spoilers) confirmed it all.

For a first play from a new company, Feeling Haunted has a confidence and ambition to it that is impressive. The use of the stage/screen space is both fun and compelling, and the gusto of the performances carries even the most groan-worthy of puns. It’s true that the material sometimes lacks originality, and some of the comedy takes the path well-travelled, but the format and story of Feeling Haunted allows this emerging company to show off what it can do, both in terms of comedic performance and also multi-media production. The pace and length of the piece is just right as well, giving us a taste – I hope – of what will come from Psycho Garbage as they develop and stretch their talents further.

(And, I should add… although some of the spoof adverts are pretty standard parody material, like a firm of personal injury lawyers or the aforementioned Cillit Bang, I really didn’t expect to see a take on the DFS adverts that was genuinely original and unlike any that I’ve seen before. So kudos to Psycho Garbage for managing to find something funny to say about DFS adverts that hasn’t been said before!)

Overall, this was an enjoyable and fun piece of theatre that plays it comedy with a heavy hand but evident skill. The Feeling Haunted programme describes itself as a ‘silly little show’, but I think the company are doing themselves down here. It might be silly, but it certainly doesn’t feel ‘little’. I look forward to seeing what Psycho Garbage do next.

Feeling Haunted was on at Chapeltown Picture House on Sunday 19th September, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. To see the full programme for this year’s Fringe, please visit the festival website.

Review: The Comedy of Errors / La Commedia degli Errori (The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company, GM Fringe)

Wednesday 15th September 2021
GMF Digital Events

The Greater Manchester Fringe continues throughout September, and I’m continuing to review shows from this year’s programme on this blog and on North Manchester FM. Although most of the shows at this year’s festival are live and in-person, there is a selection of digital events as well. On Wednesday 15th September, I watched one of these digital productions: a bilingual English-Italian production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (or La Commedia degli Errori) by The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company. The radio version of my review will be going out on the Hannah’s Bookshelf GM Fringe Reviews Special on Tuesday 21st September, but here’s the blog version…

The Comedy of Errors is not one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays, and it’s not produced as regularly as some of his other plays. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and it’s shorter and more farcical than his later works. I have to admit, I had reservations about how this was going to work as a digital production. The comedy in The Comedy of Errors comes from an increasingly frenetic double mistaken identity plot, involving two sets of identical twins and a large amount of slapstick. I wasn’t sure whether it would be possible to do justice to this on a Zoom-style digital performance.

I think I probably should have had more faith in The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company!

The performance begins with the cast and crew assembling on a video chat in preparation to travel to the US for a performance. However, last-minute Covid restrictions mean that they aren’t going to be able to travel after all – the show will have to go online.

It’s a nice little introduction, setting the scene for a production that will be entirely online with the performers acting their parts in separation. Admittedly – and this is a really strange thing to say! – but a couple of the Zoom jokes (someone forgetting to unmute, someone else accidentally putting up an embarrassing background) actually felt a little dated. I guess that type of humour is so 2020 now. However, the ‘comedy of errors’ (lower-case) of getting the show up-and-running, from the cancelled US trip to the awkwardness of group video conferencing, felt very fitting for Shakespeare’s play. It reminded me that The Comedy of Errors was first performed in 1594, just as London’s theatres were reopening after a series of plague-related closures. This is a very apt play to watch as we tentatively return to the world of live theatre.

The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company offer an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare’s play of twins (two sets) separated at birth and then accidentally reunited… with hilarious consequences. The play opens with an elderly merchant of Syracuse (Egeon, played here by Stephano Guerriero) arriving in the Greek city of Ephesus. Due to a prohibitive law, he is immediately arrested and sentenced to execution. In his own defence, he recounts a sad story (in Italian): Egeon and his wife had twin sons, and they also purchased the twin sons of a poor woman in the town to serve as their bondsmen. When disaster struck, and the family were in a shipwreck, Egeon was rescued with one son and one slave, and his wife Emilia was rescued with the other son and the other slave. Both sons are raised by their respective parents and are called Antipholus; both slaves stay with their respective owners and are called Dromio. (And if you think that sounds confusing, it’s only the beginning.)

Shakespeare’s comedy is notable for its unity of time and place. Unlike many of his other comedies, it takes place in a single location and over a period of just one day. The confusion ramps up a notch as we meet Antipholus of Syracuse (played by Gianluigi Calvani), arriving in Ephesus and charging Dromio of Syracuse (played by Alice Lussiana Parente) with taking some money to a local inn. Shortly afterwards, he runs into Dromio of Ephesus (played by Alice Lussiana Parente) and is confused when the slave denies any knowledge of the money, believing that the man is his master Antipholus of Ephesus (played by Gianluigi Calvani). Phew.

The company handles this manic confusion in an impressive way. The pseudo-Zoom set-up actually works in their favour, as it allows the actors to appear on screen together for the final reconciliation scenes. Similarly, the bilingual nature of the play, with the characters from Syracuse occasionally switching to Italian when conversing with one another, helps to keep some sense of distinction between the two Antipholuses and the two Dromios.

Praise has to be given to the actors, of course. Although the Antipholuses and the Dromios are each dressed differently, both Calvani and Parente also imbue their two characters with different personalities, styles and physical performances. It becomes relatively easy to distinguish between the confident, slightly swaggering Antipholus of Ephesus and his more excitable, romantic brother. Similarly, Dromio of Syracuse bounces and dances in each of his scenes, in contrast to his somewhat more browbeaten and hen-pecked brother.

I enjoyed all of the performances here. Gilda Mercado is arresting as Adriana, the baffled and furious wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, who believes her husband is either committing a cruel deception or, perhaps, is possessed by evil spirits. Elize Layton offers strong support as Adriana’s sister Luciana, who believes her brother-in-law has randomly started flirting with her (spoiler alert… it was his twin all along!). Ginerva Tortora convinces as an angry goldsmith who believes Antipholus is trying to obtain goods without paying, and Muge Karagulle makes a late appearance as the Lady Abbess who might be more significant than we first realize.

In true Shakespearean tradition, some actors double (or rather triple) up on parts (and not because they are playing twins). Frances Knight appears in a variety of roles, but perhaps most memorably as Nell, the kitchen-maid wife of Dromio of Ephesus, who is described in rather unflattering terms by her husband’s twin. And Joe Staton plays Duke Solinus and Balthazar, but also gives an unsettlingly scene-stealing turn as Dr Pinch, a conjuror-cum-doctor who offers to exorcise the supposedly possessed Antipholus.

It would be remiss of me to not also mention J.T. Stocks’s direction here as well. The whole thing comes together so well, collapsing the distance and separation between the performers to the extent that they even manage to get some of the slapstick (much of which revolves around people hitting the Dromios with varying brutality) on screen, no mean feat given the constrictions of the digital format. Strong direction brings this to our screens with confidence.

I did have reservations beforehand, but after watching The Comedy of Errors, I found myself reflecting on the ways in which the digital format enhanced rather than diminished the viewing experience. The Blind Cupid Shakespeare Company take every opportunity offered by the format, but not at the expense of strong performances and solid direction. They use the video conferencing technology, but they don’t rely on it entirely.

Now, I won’t say that you’ll come away from this performance feeling that it was a plausible and logical piece of drama. But that’s all on Shakespeare! The Comedy of Errors is a short, frantic piece of silly comedy that requires a healthy suspension of disbelief. It’s easy to imagine that, in 1594, audiences were ready for a bit of silly escapism after the traumas and hardships of the plague and the various lockdowns and restrictions.

I wonder if Shakespeare could have imagined that the play would serve the same purpose over four centuries later.

I thoroughly recommend The Comedy of Errors (or La Commedia degli Errori). If you’d like to see Shakespeare at his most chaotic, handled by a competent company of performers with a strong director at the helm, then this one is definitely worth checking out. (And as an additional bonus, it turns out that Shakespearian dialogue sounds beautiful in Italian!).

The Comedy of Errors / La Commedia degli Errori is streaming throughout September, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. To see the full programme for this year’s Fringe, visit the festival website.

Review: Failure Studies (Precarious Theatre, GM Fringe)

Sunday 12th September 2021
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

The Greater Manchester Fringe continues throughout September, and I’m continuing to review a selection from the programme on this blog and on North Manchester FM. On Sunday 12th September, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre in Salford to see my next show from the festival programme: Failure Studies by Precarious Theatre. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on the Hannah’s Bookshelf GM Fringe Reviews Special on Tuesday 14th September, but here’s the blog version…

Failure Studies is a one-act play written by Marco Biasioli and produced by Precarious Theatre, a new company recently formed by Biasioli and Liam Grogan. This is actually the third play by Biasioli than I’ve seen (and reviewed). His debut script, Hanging, was produced by Tangled Theatre for the 2018 Greater Manchester Fringe, and his second play, Underwater, was performed by Gare du Nord at the 2019 festival. As with my previous review (Libby Hall’s Your Playground Voice is Gone), I can’t help but reflect on the similarities and differences between this year’s piece and previous examples of the playwright’s work.

However, I don’t intend to labour the comparisons too much here (though I might not be able to resist pointing out a couple), as it’s really not necessary to be familiar with Hanging and Underwater to understand Failure Studies and, while there are stylistic, structural and thematic echoes with the earlier two plays (and some cast crossover, as David Allen and Luke Richards appeared in Underwater as well as Failure Studies), Precarious Theatre’s production is really quite a different play to the previous works, and in many ways something of a development.

The audience enters the King’s Arms Theatre – charmingly and comfortably laid out cabaret, rather than theatre, style – to find the three performers already on stage. David Allen and Francesca Maria Izzo are sitting behind a desk, apparently asleep with their heads down, and Luke Richards is lying underneath the desk, also apparently sleeping. Around them, the stage space is littered with hundreds of pieces of papers.

The play begins with an alarm clock sounding and a recorded voice instructing Georgie (Richards) to wake up and prepare himself for the day. What follows is an extended sequence in which Richards shows off his physical comedy skills, miming an exhausting morning routine that takes in ablutions, meditation, yoga, a workout, breakfast preparations and coffee-making. It ends – bizarrely – with Georgie being told to ‘put on his costume’. We don’t see the costume (Richards continues to mime the actions), but from this point Georgie has become a chicken.

For all its cheeky side swipes at ‘wellness’ rituals – Georgie’s morning routine includes some light-hearted mockery of the hipsterism of almond milk oatmeal, performative yoga and trendy trainers that are too young for the wearer to pull off that is reminiscent of Richards’s performance as a vegan killer whale in 2019’s Underwater – this initial sequence is actually leading us into something much more absurd. And I use that word very specifically.

While Biasioli’s previous plays were undoubtedly odd, off-beat and occasionally opaque, the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd is much more clearly discernible in Failure Studies. In its dystopian strangeness (complete with the partial metamorphosis of a human into an animal), there are echoes of Ionesco in places. However, the dialogue between the three characters (and the undercurrent of menace and physical threat) feels much more reminiscent of Pinter. There is something more assured in the way Failure Studies develops its absurdity, meaning that this feels like a much more confident production that presents itself with conviction and vigour.

As with Biasioli’s previous two plays, Failure Studies is a single-act divided into a series of sequences performed on the same set and in the same costumes. After Georgie’s morning sequence, the lights drop, and when they come back up the stage is now an office. Marc (played by Allen) and Babe (Izzo) are sitting behind their shared desk at the editorial office of Failure Studies, a pseudo-academic journal that publishes articles on failure. Georgie – now a chicken – is their intern, and Marc periodically throws crumbs at him from a box on the desk. As Babe points out early on, the crumbs are poisoned, though the effect they have on Georgie varies wildly throughout the play.

What follows from this is an exploration of failure, futility and the unsettling pointlessness of human endeavour. In the Theatre of the Absurd tradition, the play’s message is nebulous and constantly shifting. At times, there is what appears to be a direct critique of capitalism – Georgie is the exploited intern being humiliated for sport by the sadistic and megalomaniacal Marc – but elsewhere the focus shifts to a cutting critique of individualism – Marc’s dissection of Georgie’s belief that he is ‘special’ and ‘talented’ is presented through a sort of parade of Barnum statements (‘You’re an artist,’ ‘You’re different’, ‘You’re only doing this job to help your creativity’) that reaches a bitter and hard-hitting crescendo.

Behind this, however, is another story. Occasional glances between Georgie and Babe suggest that their relationship might not be as it appears, and a repeated return to the ‘Ancient Greeks’ and a fear of the outside world is noticeable. A sense of dystopia is created through these hints, and also through the inexplicable claustrophobia of the set and characterization, and this comes to the fore in the play’s final sequences. What this dystopian context actually is, though, is uncertain, as the play resists comforting exposition and resolution.

The three actors offer strong performances throughout. Richards brings an exuberance and charm to his portrayal of the baffling and unknowable Georgie, switching in an instant from mute physicality to verbosity and then back again. Izzo is unsettling in a different way as Babe; while she appears to be a ‘voice of reason’ or a sort of futile moral compass, offering a corrective to Marc’s excesses, this is undermined just enough by Izzo’s blank detachment to make us question how much we trust in her compass. And Allen starts small but builds to a frenetic and frankly unnerving pitch by the end of the play that is really something to behold.

While much of the absurdity of Failure Studies is developed through set-piece dialogues and the occasional monologue, there is a lot of physical performance here too. I’ve mentioned Richards’s physical comedy performance at the beginning of the play, but credit also has to be given to the acting and direction for some intensely physical sequences towards the end of the play. While Pinter may have used elliptical dialogue and scene breaks to imply menace and violence, Biasioli’s play shows this in a break-neck, in-your-face way. One of the final sequences left me tired just watching it, and I had a genuine concern for Allen’s safety at one point! (It’s always disturbing when an actor says ‘Did we kill him?’, and you’re not completely sure whether they’re still in character! Fortunately, Allen took his bow with the others at the play’s close, so I think he was okay!)

Failure Studies was an enjoyably baffling play to watch. As a fan of Theatre of the Absurd, I appreciated both the opaque dialogue and the continued (but frustrated) suggestions that something more profound was lurking just out of reach, under the surface. It was also good to see this development of Biasioli’s writing. While I did enjoy Hanging and Underwater at previous festivals, Failure Studies is undoubtedly a more assured and confident piece, and one which carries its absurdity with conviction, menace and humour.

Failure Studies is on at the King’s Arms Theatre on Sunday 12th-Tuesday 14th September, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. To see the full programme for this year’s Fringe, visit the festival website.