Review: Make-Up (NoLogoProductions, GM Fringe)

Sunday 17 July 2022
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

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 Sunday 17th July, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre to review Make-Up, a play by NoLogoProductions. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 22nd July, but here’s the blog version…

Make-Up (written and directed by Andy Moseley) opens on an empty stage, with a dressing table and clothes rail suggesting that we are actually backstage. We’re waiting for the performer – Lady Christina (played by Moj Taylor) – to sing her final number on-stage. Taylor appears as Lady Christina in sequinned dress, black curly wig and heavy, stylized make-up and belts out one last number (‘Hey Big Spender’, of course), before going into the dressing room.

This might sound a little confusing – what’s ‘backstage’ and what’s ‘on-stage’ here? But the effect was quite an interesting one. The ‘backstage’ area was in the centre of the stage at the King’s Arms. When Taylor entered to perform as Lady Christina, he stood to the side of the stage and addressed us (the audience in the King’s Arms, that is) as though we were Lady Christina’s audience in a Wolverhampton club. Taylor then exited behind a curtain, before immediately reappearing and addressing us (the audience in the King’s Arms) as though we were a different audience, the ones who got to look behind the curtain and see Lady Christina’s reaction to those who had bought a ticket to watch her show. Although this all happened very quickly, and with a very light touch, this opening switch of perspective really sets up the rest of the show, and encourages a particular mode of engagement with the character – we could easily be an audience who have paid to watch a drag act, but for tonight we’re allowed to look behind that curtain.

What begins as a few acerbic (and very funny) swipes at Lady Christina’s audience – with a couple of cheeky lines about Wolverhampton itself – quite quickly becomes a more reflective monologue on the experience of performing a drag act in such clubs for twenty years. There’s some commentary on the changes in audience, for instance, and of the expectations and attitudes of newer, younger performers. Lady Christina is frustrated – jaded, even – commenting that young wannabes on the scene don’t realize that ‘There’s no fast-track to fame. There’s no slow-track to fame either.’ Taylor performs this opening sequence with charisma and humour, but his mannerisms and delivery exude a poignant world-weariness that sets us up for what is to come.

As we may well have expected from the set dressing, Lady Christina begins to remove some of her accessories and costume to reveal the performer beneath. This is Chris, and it’s his birthday. He has four birthday cards to show for it, and he doesn’t seem particularly happy to have received them.

Taylor handles the transformation – or, perhaps, deconstruction – from Lady Christina to Chris with a finely tuned emotional range. Every gesture seems to shout out a tangled web of emotions beneath the surface. The wig is removed and thrown to the floor, and Taylor pulls grips out of his hair with tangible annoyance (and not, it seems, only at the hairgrips). Make-up is removed angrily; hair is tousled with a sense of unease. Chris emerges from behind the costume and the monologue moves to addressing another set of concerns, the difficulties he feels as a performer, and as a gay man, who is no longer in – shall we say? – the first flush of youth.

The writing and performance throughout Make-Up are impressive, working together to create an absolutely real character, with all the messy complexities, contradictions and – yes – flaws that entails. But a moment comes when Chris looks into the mirror on his dressing table, and the whole focus of the play shifts. For me, this is when Make-Up really comes into its own.

The birthday cards Chris receives are for his forty-fourth birthday. Now, I appreciate I might be absolutely primed to identify with this, given that my forty-fourth birthday is literally a couple of weeks away, but I’d still argue that when that shift of focus comes, Moseley’s writing so beautifully captures something of the essence of being in your mid-forties that it almost transcends the specifics of Chris’s story.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler as such to say that when Chris looks into the mirror, he sees his father reflected back. So far, so you’re-in-your-forties-cliché. However, the monologue shifts then from Chris addressing the audience to Chris addressing his father, and to Chris saying twenty years’ worth of things he’s been unable to say to his father’s face.

Again, the emotional range here is notable. It is heart-breaking when Chris remembers how his youthful ambition to be a teacher was thwarted by the crushing realization of what Section 28 really meant. It is raw when Chris recalls his father’s reaction to discovering he was gay. And it’s utterly moving – painful, even – when Chris begins to recall his relationship with his mother after he became estranged from his father.

But the thing that really lifts Make-Up to the next level for me is the humanity of it all. As Chris goes over his formative experiences, there is a real sense that he has come – as, maybe, we all do in our forties – to see his father as a human being. A deeply flawed and perhaps unforgivable human being, but a human being nonetheless. Without actually quoting Larkin, Chris evokes the spirit of ‘This be the Verse’, as he reflects briefly on his father’s formative experiences. It’s not an excuse, as he’s quick to point out, but it goes some way towards an explanation. Taylor’s performance of this part of the monologue is nuanced, balancing a clear desire to understand with brittle anger at having had to deal with someone else’s problems.

Make-Up is a one-act, one-hour monologue, which is a fairly standard format for a Fringe play (I’d say it’s the most usual format I’ve seen at the Greater Manchester Fringe). NoLogoProductions really understand the potential of this format, and the overall ‘shape’ of Make-Up shows an assured ability to use the time and space effectively. The richness of Chris’s backstory is conjured with a deft touch, and the arc of self-awareness the character travels leads us to a satisfying conclusion (with a firm avoidance of sentimentality and just a hint of an unanswered question or two). It’s a confident piece of writing and direction, brought to life by a truly compelling performance from Taylor.

In case you haven’t guessed, Make-Up is a strong recommendation from me. Although it’s now finished its run at the Greater Manchester Fringe, I believe NoLogoProductions do have other performance dates lined up at other festivals. If you get the chance to see it, it’s well worth a watch. And I’ll certainly be looking out for future work from Moj Taylor, Andy Moseley and NoLogoProductions in the future.

Make-Up was on at the King’s Arms Theatre on 16th and 17th 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: Bessie at Midnight, Alone (Blue Masque Theatre Company, GM Fringe)

Friday 15 July 2022
Salford Arts Theatre

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 15th July, I was at the Salford Arts Theatre to review Bessie at Midnight, Alone, a performance by Blue Masque Theatre Company. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 22nd July, but here’s the blog version…

Bessie at Midnight, Alone is a new production from Blue Masque Theatre Company. Written by Derek Martin and directed by Rhonwen McCormack, the play is a one-act (sort of!) monologue featuring the titular Bessie… well, at midnight and alone.

Bessie is a prostitute, and she is waiting in an isolated patch of woodland for one of her clients to arrive. As she waits, she tells her story to the audience in a roundabout, meandering narrative, punctuated by the ominous sounds of rustling undergrowth and interrupted by Bessie calling out to whoever it is who is watching her. Her story takes in her life as a prostitute, and a couple of her regular clients (The Colonel and Merrie Andrew) with whom she’s had long-standing business arrangements. Bessie also talks about her mother, and the way she was introduced to the sex trade as a child, and about a young rival who goes by the name Maria Bella Amorosa, despite not actually being Italian.

Bessie, played by Janelle Thompson, appears on stage with just a lantern in one hand and a blanket in the other. She is confident and assured, despite the darkness and foreboding noises coming from the bushes. She is waiting for Merrie Andrew, a young man who – we will learn later in the play’s first half – is somewhat intellectually challenged.

The first striking thing about the character of Bessie is her costume. Designed by Zoey Barnes, Bessie’s outfit sets the scene for how the play will unfold. While undoubtedly conjuring the image of a Victorian ‘harlot’, Bessie’s outfit is unfinished and curiously anachronistic. An electric blue bustier is paired with a hooped underskirt cage (but no petticoat or overskirt) through which fishnet stockings are visible. This costuming creates a very particular atmosphere and tone, without being easily attached to specific historic circumstance – and this approach will define the play as a whole.

Although a lot of Bessie at Midnight, Alone feels as though it is set in particular time – specifically, the late Victorian period – this is effected through touching on certain stereotypical images of the ‘harlot’ from popular culture, rather than directly offering historical context. On a closer watch, much of the play works to deny a Victorian setting rather than affirm it – ‘Merrie Andrew’ feels like a character from an earlier time, and some of Bessie’s language (e.g. referring to nuns as having a ‘hotline to God’) feels far more modern. Musical cues, too, unsettle our notion of a clear setting, with some parts of Bessie’s monologue being accompanied by a varied soundtrack that takes in styles from the medieval to the modern.

Now, I’ve said that Bessie at Midnight, Alone is a monologue, and it is – technically. But this term perhaps doesn’t do justice to the storytelling techniques at work here. While much of the narrative is delivered by Bessie ‘telling her story’ to the audience, she breaks off at times to perform short sketches to illustrate scenes from her life.

It’s in these sketches that Thompson’s skill as a performer really shines. As Bessie acts out the roles of Merrie Andrew, The Colonel, her mother and – later – a police officer and a nun, Thompson embodies these characters, adopting new voices, mannerisms and physical performance to bring the characters to life on stage. Thompson doesn’t slip, either, making each persona as ‘real’ as Bessie herself. Interestingly, the only significant character who doesn’t ‘appear’ on stage is Maria Bella Amorosa, whose interactions with Bessie are only ever narrated and not performed. Without giving any spoilers – though, as Bessie herself notes in the second half of the play, some audience members may guess something important before it is revealed (I’ll admit that I did!) – this decision is, in fact, a storytelling technique in itself, and one that works very well.

At the beginning of this review, I referred to Bessie at Midnight, Alone as a one-act play. This is technically true, as there is no interval and the performer doesn’t leave the stage throughout. However, it’s also technically not true, as the narrative and performance is split into two distinct sections, which are separated by a brief blackout and an interval of time.

The play’s first half takes place in the woods where Bessie is waiting, alone, for Merrie Andrew. In this section, she recounts various events in her life that have led her to that place at that moment, often boldly asserting her contentment in her choice of career (though this is tempered by several suggestions that it was far from a ‘choice’ – Bessie does acknowledge earlier aspirations to be an actor or a nun, from which she was steered by her mother, and to marry The Colonel, from which she was steered by… well… The Colonel). That’s not to say there aren't indications of an underlying dissatisfaction, or even unhappiness. I found some of the more comical set pieces – for instance, the Merrie Andrew scenes – unsettling in their evocation of a woman whose entire adult life has revolved around being used for the pleasure of others. ‘You’re not like the others’ quickly gives way to ‘You let me do anything’, and Thompson skilfully lets a subtle hollowness ring through the comedic lines.

This first half builds to a climax as the noise from the bushes builds to a moment of confrontation. The lights drop, and then we rejoin Bessie a number of hours later. The play’s second half then takes a different direction, with the protagonist more reflective and less content with her life. There are more questions in the second act – some of which are directly posed by Bessie, and some of which might linger in the minds of the audience.

In some respects, the play’s second half is less focused, and its narrative ‘shape’ is less distinct. There are moments of repetition, and Bessie’s assured narrative of the first half gives way to a more fragmented (often unclear) storyline. For me, this change of direction worked well. The clarity and confidence of the first half gives way to vulnerability and fear, picking up on some of the more unsettling undercurrents in Bessie’s earlier narration and allowing the depth and complexity of the character to develop.

I do wonder, though, whether this transition would have been clearer had the play been more definitively split into two acts. A short interval after the climactic blackout might help to keep the audience on a surer footing.

Overall, though, I enjoyed Bessie at Midnight, Alone. Perhaps it’s a mark of my own personal taste, but I found the vagueness of time and place, along with the circuitous shape of Bessie’s story, very compelling. I do enjoy uncertainty! However, these features can only work with an assured and engaging performance, and Thompson certainly offered us that. If you get chance to see Blue Masque Theatre’s production of Bessie at Midnight, Alone at another festival this year, this one’s a recommendation from me.

Bessie at Midnight, Alone was on at the Salford Arts Theatre on 14th-16th 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: 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: Atlas (Oddly Moving)

Tuesday 8th March 2022
The Lowry, Salford

On Tuesday 8th March, I was at The Lowry to see Atlas, a retelling of the Atlas myth by Oddly Moving. I’ll be reviewing this production on Hannah’s Bookshelf, my weekly literature show on North Manchester FM, later in the month. But here’s the blog version of my review…

Produced by Turtle Key Arts and directed by Charlotte Mooney, Atlas is a three-woman, single-act performance that retells the classical myth of Atlas, the titan condemned to eternally carry the entire weight of the cosmos, through physical theatre, storytelling and circus skills.

The play opens on a fairly plain and empty stage – this is a piece of theatre that relies much more of props and performance than stage dressing. A woman (Grania Pickard) collects a cardboard box full of toy figures, lays them out on a mirrored surface, and begins to narrate the story of Cronos, Zeus, and the war between the gods and the titans. It’s a light-hearted and intimate narration, in which Pickard comically illustrates Cronos devouring his own children with the help of some plastic dinosaurs and zoo animals. It feels almost like the way you might tell the story to children, and both the performance space and the performance style enhance the almost cosy informality of the narration.

When the woman reaches the introduction to Atlas, and Cronos’s recruitment of this particular titan to lead the army against Zeus and the other gods, Pickard is joined on stage by another performer (Arielle Lauzon) who silently dons a breastplate and wrist guards, ready for battle.

It’s at this point that the performance moves away from the gentle storytelling and into a more physical representation of the myth. The war between the titans and the gods is illustrated through stylized physical theatre, with Pickard and Lauzon being joined by the third performer, Helena Berry.

As the play continues, different modes of physical performance are used to create vignettes in Atlas’s story. Berry mimes the Labours of Herakles; Lauzon juggles with the golden apples of the Hesperides; Pickard collects and deposits an assortment of small hessian sacks, moving them round the stage to transform them from sandbags on the battlefield, to a weighty burden to be cleared away single-handedly, to sacks of soil that turn the stage into a garden. The fluidity of these movements works well with the storytelling style, as though we’ve moved from imagining the story through the plastic animal toys to imagining it through the movement of the performers on stage.

As I said, the story is presented through a series of vignettes, which are laced together by Pickard’s storytelling narration. A standout for me was Berry’s swaggering evocation of Herakles. This sequence uses mime and physical performance to evoke a sort of macho pointlessness to the Twelve Labours; without saying a word, Berry’s physicality here conveys a lot about the character. This is a Herakles who can perform amazing feats – and doesn’t he just know it? It’s a compelling and lightly comical vignette, which stays just on the right side of absurdity.

While Atlas might be described as a dynamic performance, with Pickard, Lauzon and Berry moving seamlessly on and off the stage, interacting with the props and switching physical styles without missing a beat, it’s also a performance that makes powerful use of stasis as well.

The moment when Atlas is commanded to lift the cosmos and hold it for eternity is evoked through Lauzon lifting the circular mirror (previously used to lay out the plastic toys of Pickard’s introduction) above her head. The stance Lauzon adopts and the effort apparent in raising the mirror above her head, followed by a breath-holding moment as she locks her arms and stands stock still to keep the weight in the air, is impressive. As the mirror – the ‘cosmos’ – slowly weighs her down, gradually forcing her into a crouch before she adopts the pose we might be familiar with from art and sculpture.

The sequence is almost visceral, and Lauzon’s performance not only encourages the audience to ‘feel’ the weight pressing down on Atlas, but also to emphasize – in a very physical way – with both the pain and the resignation as the titan accepts the punishment.

And this is something that continues throughout the piece. Lauzon offers us a very human Atlas. Again, without using any words, the physical performance conveys character, and the audience is tacitly encouraged to imagine the human emotions that might be accompany such a super-human (or inhuman) burden.

That said, while Lauzon and Berry evoke mythological figures through wordless physical performance, there are words here. Pickard’s narration continues throughout the piece, and the words she speaks offer another dimension to what we are watching.

Although the narration is mainly a continuation of the introductory narration of the classical myth, with Pickard continuing the intimate and gentle style of the opening sequence, another story emerges through interjections and asides. And this bit was something of a (pleasant) surprise.

The other story – and I don’t want to give too much away about this – is told through such light-touch narration that you might almost miss the significance of what’s being said, particularly in the initial interjection from Pickard, as she collects up the weighty sacks and holds them in her arms. The way in which an entire character and backstory is conjured through almost minimal narration is impressive. Pickard actually speaks very few lines of this ‘other’ story, and at one point says only a single, seemingly misplaced word, and yet this opens up a whole other perspective on the Atlas myth and its significance. And, as with Lauzon’s physical performance as the weighed-down Atlas, it subtly encourages an empathetic response in the audience, without offering heavy-handed explanations or directives.

I know I must have overused the words ‘intimacy’ and ‘empathy’ in this review, but these were absolutely my lasting impressions of this performance. The physical performances combine perfectly with the storytelling to share a simple tale with the audience – but, as it transpires, there is more than one story being told here.

I thoroughly enjoyed Atlas. It was an engaging and immersive piece of physical theatre, with three excellent performances and a real charm to the deceptively straightforward storytelling. If you get chance to catch a future performance, this one is a recommendation from me.

Atlas by Oddly Moving was on at The Lowry, Salford, on Tuesday 8th March, as part of a UK tour. For more information, and for future tour dates, please visit the Turtle Key Arts 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.