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.
