Review: The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind (Gare du Nord Theatre, GM Fringe)

Thursday 11th July 2019
Stockport Train Station

This year’s Greater Manchester Fringe is on from the 1st-31st July, and I’m continuing my journey through a selection of the many shows on the programme for this blog and North Manchester FM. The next show I’m reviewing is The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind by Gare du Nord Theatre, which I saw in Stockport on Thursday 11th July. The radio version of this review aired on today’s Hannah’s Bookshelf, but – as always – here’s the blog version…

The Fringe is a multi-venue festival that takes place across Greater Manchester. One of the benefits of this is that the festival encourages people to travel to different boroughs and to visit theatres and studios that they haven’t been to before – already this year, for instance, I’ve been introduced to Twenty Twenty Two in Manchester and the Whitefield Garrick. However, another benefit of the Fringe’s multi-venue ethos is that some companies stage performances in non-theatre spaces as well. Step up: The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind… which was performed in a disused waiting room between the platforms at Stockport Train Station.

The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind is a production by Gare du Nord Theatre. You may remember that my first review this year was of Gare du Nord’s Underwater, so it was a pleasure to have the chance to see another of the company’s three productions on this year’s programme. It was also great to experience some site-specific theatre – the unconventional performance space for The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind isn’t just a gimmick, but rather a part of the show itself.

The play is a reprisal of their award-winning 2017 show, though with a slightly different cast. It’s an immersive (though light-touch immersive) show that offers a somewhat wistful and poetic meditation on journeying, adventuring and passing-by.

When you arrive at Platform 3 at the station for the show, everything feels fairly normal. Evening travellers are waiting for trains, and station staff are going about their business. However, you then spot a few unconventional travellers on the platform. Smiling and interacting with audience members and commuters, these travellers are dressed in quirky, slightly old-fashioned clothing. They look like they might’ve dropped in from a different time.

This is what I mean by ‘light-touch immersive’. The audience doesn’t participate in the action of the play, but the way the company use and inhabit the site transforms the way we look at the otherwise ordinary train station. For an hour or so, the ordinary becomes a little bit extraordinary.

The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind is a lyrical and whimsical tale – with a slight Gallic inflection – of connections and journeys. As a man (the eponymous beggars) sits and strums a guitar, another man (played by Geoff Baker) walks hurriedly in front of us, from one door of the room to the other. He drops a coin into the beggar’s guitar case, but he has no time to stop, because he’s just ‘passing by’. A married couple (played by Emma Yates and James Boucher) arrive to wait for a train. They speak at cross purposes to one another and are repeatedly interrupted by the passer-by. Eventually, the wife is distracted enough to talk to the stranger, and they discover a deep and significant sense of connection.

The play dispenses with naturalistic performance and dialogue to instead offer eccentric and poetic flights of fancy that conjure up romanticized vistas that can only be reached by train. The wife and the passer-by describe a wondrous and rather off-beat journey, imagining the incredible sights they could see together – only to have to their fantastical scenario shattered by the arrival of the last train. Is their brief interlude real? Or is it a dream? It feels as though we might be suspended between the two.

To add to the otherworldly feel, the dialogue of the first half is mirrored in the second. This time, as the couple fail to communicate with one another (with lines switched around from their earlier conversation, and the dynamic of the married couple reversed), it is the husband who is distracted by a passer-by – played by Martine Anson – and who begins an imagined adventure.

While their roles mirror and echo one another, I very much enjoyed the differences between Anson and Baker’s performances. Anson exudes a wistful optimism, combined with a neat glamour, that lends a hopefulness to her daydreams of adventure. Baker, on the other hand, projects a sense of sadness. His character seems isolated and awkward, giving his brief connection with a stranger at the station a real poignancy. Anson carries a barometer – wondering at one point whether the instrument describes the present or predicts the future – whereas Baker carries a clock, marking time. Interestingly, while Yates and Boucher’s married couple are an anchor to the story, it is the people who are just passing by that steal our (and their) attention.

Of course, the other star of the show is Stockport Train Station itself. While the performance is going on, trains come and go as though carefully choreographed. And as the heavy door to the waiting room is slid back and forth to allow the characters to ‘pass by’, the room becomes briefly filled with the sounds of the platform, creating a truly unique atmosphere.

The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind is an unusual and captivating show, with a little drop of magic in the way the play interacts with its venue. As I exited the show, I really did feel that I was looking at the station through slightly different eyes. A quirky, off-beat and rather sweet experience, this show is well worth going to see.

The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind was on at Stockport Train Station on the 11th and 12th July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. It will be on at the Buxton Fringe on 13th and 14th July, and the Edinburgh Fringe on 17th and 18th August. For the full programme of shows on at this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe, visit the festival website.

Review: Underwater (Gare du Nord Theatre, GM Fringe)

Tuesday 2nd July 2019
The Whiskey Jar, Manchester

The 2019 Greater Manchester Fringe Festival began on Monday 1st July. This year’s programme is really packed, and I’m going to be reviewing a selection of the productions on offer throughout the month for this blog and for North Manchester FM.

The first performance I attended this year was on Tuesday 2nd July, and it was Underwater by Gare du Nord Theatre, which is on at The Whiskey Jar in the Northern Quarter. I generally like to go into Fringe shows armed with as little information as possible – strange though that might sound! – as I love the feeling of now knowing what to expect and being surprised. However, I did have a bit of info in advance for this one, as I interviewed Geoff Baker of Gare du Nord for my Hannah’s Bookshelf Greater Manchester Fringe Special, which aired on 29th June.

Underwater is a one-act play that takes place in the sea. In truth, it would be more accurate to describe it as a mini-trilogy of plays, as it is a sequence of short pieces written by Marco Biasioli. Although it was actually a complete coincidence, it feels rather appropriate that Underwater is the first Fringe play I’ve seen this year, as I rounded off last year’s Fringe by seeing Hanging by Tangled Theatre, which was also a production of a play by Biasioli and was also performed at The Whiskey Jar.

There are some definite comparisons to be made between Hanging and Underwater – the dream-like, semi-surreal characterizations and the off-beat, disjointed dialogue being the most obvious. Both plays also use an odd, slightly unsettling humour, though this is more pronounced in Underwater, which combines verbal humour with more physical comedic turns. Certainly, there is a clearer sense of a ‘message’ in Underwater, though this is carried as much through the direction and design as through the script, but there is still some sense of ambiguity and uncertainty at times.

Billed as a ‘show in the dark’, Underwater actually starts with the stage lit up and the actors visible. As the audience arrive, the cast – Luke Richards, Eloise Bonney and David Allen – are sitting cross-legged on the stage, waiting for us. They sing snippets of water-themed pop songs and look slightly impatient. Around them are transparent bin bags filled with rubbish, and the stage is strewn with plastic debris.

The first piece in the mini-trilogy takes place on and near the surface of the sea. Allen becomes a rather fatalistic seagull (with a wistful West Country accent), sitting on a rock and delivering a monologue about the lack of other rocks and other seagulls. It’s not initially clear whether this is a vision of a future where sea levels have risen, or that Allen is playing a particularly solipsistic seagull – given the content of the rest of the play, I tend to think it’s the former.

The seagull envies the killer whales, who he believes want to eat him. Little does he know, said whales (played by Richards and Bonney) have embraced veganism and are attempting to live solely on seaweed. The plan, intended to atone for the species’ mass slaughter of krill, is not going well, and it seems that these two (named Orco and Bianca) may be the last two remaining orcas in the ocean.

I don’t want to give too much away about the direction the short pieces take – it always seems unfair to describe too much of a play of this length. Suffice to say, the vegan killer whales segment combines veiled environmental commentary with a satirical side-swipe at right-on hipsterism and misplaced activism. The latter is the more heavy-handed, and is played mainly for laughs, but the former underlies this humour and connects back to the seagull’s lonely fatalism.

After the killer whales face the consequences of their dietary choices, we dive deeper into the sea for the next sequence. This is signalled by a dip in the lighting – the use of lighting is an effective aspect of the show (in the absence of backdrops and scenery, the lighting is the device by which the audience is taken underwater). The second segment features two blind jellyfish (Richards and Bonney again) and a manipulative turtle (played by Allen). This section of Underwater makes more use of physical comedy and absurdist dialogue, with the two jellyfish banging into one another – and the audience, and the furniture – with surprising force. The more manic tone of this middle section is pronounced – and ambitious, given the confines of The Whiskey Jar’s basement space!

As mentioned, the stage area of Underwater is strewn with bits of rubbish and discarded plastic. The significance of this should be pretty clear in a show that bills itself as facing ‘the environmental apocalypse’. What’s interesting about this idiosyncratic set décor though is that the actors can’t (or don’t) attempt to avoid it. The rubbish audibly swishes around their feet as they move on the stage, tangling and constantly threatening to trip them up. It isn’t mentioned at all in the first two segments, which is a nice touch. The disruptive ubiquity of plastic is an apt background noise to what we’re seeing.

Underwater’s three actors each portray three different creatures, and I have to admit I did have a favourite performance from each. Allen is great as a mournful seagull, intoning his depressive monologue about sardines with a whimsical gravitas. I also enjoyed Richards’s hipster killer whale; both his physical movements and self-righteous tone were spot on (as was his pronunciation of the name ‘Bianca’). For me, Bonney really shone as a slightly bonkers but rather charming jellyfish, intent on building an aquarium and addressing (with no clarity of thought whatsoever) political imbalances of power.

As for the final sequence of the play – when the lights finally drop down to darkness and we go to the bottom of the sea – well… you’ll have to watch it for yourself to find out where it all ends!

Underwater is on at The Whiskey Jar on Tuesday 2nd and Wednesday 3rd of July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. To see the full programme for this year’s Fringe, visit the festival website.

Gare du Nord have two other productions on this year’s festival programme: When Liam Met Emmeline in Manchester and The Suitcase, the Beggar and the Wind. And I’ll be reviewing one of these later in the month.