Seven Oaks Pub, Manchester
The Greater Manchester Fringe is on throughout the month of July at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, once again, I’m reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.
On Wednesday 27th July, I was at the Seven Oaks pub in Manchester to review On Me, a play by Dangerous to Know. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 29th July, but here’s the blog version…
On Me is a new play by Manchester-based theatre company Dangerous to Know. Written by Caroline Lamb and directed by Helen Parry, the one-act play takes place on the set of a true crime documentary. Actors Shona (Leah Eddleston) and Christian (Alexei Papadopoulos) are playing the role of victim and perpetrator respectively, acting out scenes that will illustrate the documentary’s narrative of control, abuse and rape. Dangerous to Know were very careful to give content warnings prior to the performance, and this was a sensible decision. On Me is a challenging piece to watch – discomforting, even – and while I expect Fringe theatre to pose that challenge, I appreciated being prepared for this one.
The play follows through various scenes in which Shona and Christian prepare for, and perform in, scenes from the documentary. This creates a nested quality to their characterization that helps to develop certain themes as the show develops – and I’ll return to those themes in a bit more detail shortly. But there’s a blurring of character lines at times that causes some unease. When Eddleston delivers the line, ‘Get Maryse some pickled onion Monster Munch!’, she is an actor playing an actor referring to herself by the name of her on-screen character. Is this potentially confusing for the audience? Yes – but that’s sort of the point.
In the first half of the play, Shona and Christian have to act a rape scene. Right up until the moment the director (played by Brandon Worrall) shouts ‘Action!’, they have been interacting as friendly colleagues getting ready to do a job together. An earlier scene had involved Christian throttling Shona – very grim to watch, but after the ‘Cut!’ is called, the actors revert to their professional conversation, complimenting each other’s performance and talking about agents and other roles.
The rape scene – and I should say that Dangerous to Know judge this scene well, giving the scene power but not prolonging it for the sake of it – is a different experience, both for Shona and Christian and for the audience of On Me. It resonates with a different intensity, and it isn’t defused in the same way.
The fallout from this scene is handled well. Lamb’s writing and Parry’s direction maintain an almost palpable tension throughout the rest of the play. As an audience member, I felt the atmosphere shift in the room, and that shift weighed on the following scenes.
This is a very deliberate choice by Dangerous to Know, and it’s impressive the way the production is able to evoke feelings in the audience that mirror those of the characters on stage. Shona and Christian’s relationship – they are clearly attracted to one another and are increasingly flirtatious – is changed by the performance of the scene, and this will form the main narrative conflict of the play’s second half.
As I’ve said, On Me explores some serious themes, and these are handled with complexity and nuance. What – exactly – the fallout from the performance of the rape scene is doesn’t become apparent right away. Papadopoulos, particularly, is tasked with holding back the difficult emotional and psychological effects of the performance until events push him to verbalize something of this, though even then he can’t fully explain everything. It’s an impressive performance from Papadopoulos, as it’s not an easy task to play a character who is deceptively sanguine without simply being deceptively sanguine!
Eddleston’s character goes on a different journey, and the performance here is crucial to the creation of an almost oppressive sense of paranoia that settles on the second half of the play. In some ways, Shona is an ‘everywoman’ (in the most cynical sense), and, indeed, she points this out to Christian later in the show. The experiences she has had, the experiences her loved ones have had (some of which is presented on stage when Shona receives phone calls), are sadly commonplace. The experiences of the unseen Maryse – the ‘real-life’ victim whose story forms part of the documentary (unseen, but voiced by Verity Flynn) – are an extreme case, but the show folds these into the story through the sense of blurring of Shona with Maryse, and through Christian’s anxiety that Shona (and potentially others) will see him as Maryse’s rapist after his performance on camera.
On Me is a play that resists easy answers or reassuring conclusions. It steers into the messiness of life with a boldness that is both refreshing and uncomfortable. As well as complexity, the play gives us ambiguity to think about. A good deal of this is placed on the shoulders of Sean McGlynn’s character. Listed only as ‘The Clapper Loader’, and given no dialogue until the play’s final moments, this character is nevertheless highly visible throughout. He appears in almost every scene, often upstage of the actors, but his lack of engagement with the others creates a sense of uncertainty that, again, can feel almost oppressive.
I mentioned earlier that the ‘nested’ performances here are being used to work through certain themes. Some of these – trauma, relationships, how to be a ‘good man’ knowing all the things bad men do – are discussed explicitly in the dialogue, as these are questions Shona and Christian must confront due to the nature of the material in the documentary. Moreover, their burgeoning personal relationship requires them to at least acknowledge these questions, though they may not agree on the answers.
For me, though, it was a largely unspoken theme that proved to be the most thought-provoking. I had an unusual experience at the end of On Me – as the actors returned to the stage to take their bows, I felt a strong pull of concern for Eddleston and Papadopoulos. I hoped the actors were okay, given the scenes they had just had to perform.
On the one hand, this is simply testament to the actors’ abilities. I was invested in Shona and Christian as a result, and thus I blurred the actors with the characters slightly. On the other hand – and this was the thought that lingered longest – On Me is about precisely this idea. We watch true crime, or challenging dramas, in the expectation that we will see violence, murder and rape. What is the impact of having to enact scenes such as this over and over again, particularly if certain scenes hit personal triggers? And would the actors on stage in On Me feel the same blurring effect that the character of Christian worries about in the narrative?
In the end, On Me raises these difficult questions and refuses to give us easy answers. Uncompromising writing from Lamb, careful direction from Parry, and impressive performances from all the cast work together to create a piece of challenging theatre that will stay with you long after it finishes. If you get chance to see On Me on its final dates at the Greater Manchester Fringe – or at a future performance elsewhere – I definitely recommend you check it out.
On Me is on at the Seven Oaks on 27th-30th 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.
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