Review: Tree Confessions and A Little Drape of Heaven (This Is Not A Theatre Company, C Arts, GM Fringe)

July 2022
Digital Event

The Greater Manchester Fringe ran throughout July, with performances at various venues around Greater Manchester and online. I’ve been reviewing a selection of the productions on offer for this blog, and also for The Festival Show on North Manchester FM.

The next shows I experienced this year were digital productions, and they were 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, including the Greater Manchester Fringe.

The productions I’m going to be reviewing were available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing Tree Confessions and A Little Drape of Heaven, immersive audio dramas by This Is Not A Theatre Company. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 5th August, but here’s the blog version…

This Is Not A Theatre Company had three productions on this year’s Fringe programme. Because of space constraints, I’m only going to be talking about two of them today. But I’m pretty sure that my review of those two pieces will encourage you to not only check out Tree Confessions and A Little Drape of Heaven, but also any other work by this innovative company that you might get chance to experience.

So, I’ll start with Tree Confessions. Like the other pieces by This Is Not A Theatre Company, Tree Confessions is a site-specific performance. I’ve seen site-specific theatre at the Greater Manchester Fringe before – it’s always a nice addition to the festival programme, offering a new perspective on familiar places. However, Tree Confessions is a little different to the other site-specific pieces I’ve seen.

For one, it’s an audio drama. And for two, it’s you (the listener) who will choose the site in which the piece is performed. At the start of Tree Confessions, you’re given a simple instruction: find a tree that you like and sit underneath it. You’re going to listen to this audio drama underneath the tree and – at some points, perhaps – interact with your chosen tree. Fortunately, as we know, the weather’s been pretty good this July, giving us all plenty of opportunities to enjoy Tree Confessions as its meant to be enjoyed. (And, in case you’re interested, I chose my favourite old ash tree in Crumpsall Park as my venue for the performance.)

Written by Jenny Lyn Bader and directed by Erin B. Mee, Tree Confessions is a monologue told, as you might have guessed, by a tree.

Kathleen Chalfont is the performer here, and I must say she plays a tree beautifully! But I should also say it’s not quite the performance I expected.

Chalfont’s tree narrator is warm and sonorous (and this effect is heightened by the site-specific, immersive nature of the piece), inviting us to lose ourselves in the story that unfolds. The tree explains early on that a researcher called Cindy has been a frequent visitor to the woods, monitoring and recording the trees in an attempt to prove that they communicate with one another. Cindy has indeed recorded evidence that reveals that trees can speak to one another, but, as our narrator explains, she may not have been given the full story.

What follows is a beautifully meandering exploration of what it means to be a tree. At times humorous, the narration sometimes conjures up a very domestic picture of tree-life. She jokes about her great aunt, for instance, who ‘claimed to be 2,003’. But at other times, there is something more mythic in the storytelling. She recounts the legend of the ‘Great Tree’, a fable to explain why trees release oxygen during photosynthesis.

Elsewhere, the tree explains some scientific – and some not-so-scientific – principles that explain the life of trees and the ecosystem around them, drawing us (the listener) in and encouraging us to – physically, if we are indeed listening under a tree – feel that life and be part of the ecosystem. After all, as we’re reminded, ‘we’re on the same side’.

Tree Confessions is a short audio drama that feels so much longer than its half-hour running time. It certainly achieves its aims of being immersive, as the combination of the storytelling style and Chalfont’s performance makes this a very easy piece to get lost in. I think it’s a mark of how successful this piece is that I genuinely felt sad when it finished.

This is a double-bill review, as I’m going to talk about one of This Is Not A Theatre Company’s other productions now. In some ways, the two pieces I’m talking about in this review are very similar. But, in other ways, they are so very different.

A Little Drape of Heaven is written by Mahesh Dattani and performed by Swati Das. Like Tree Confessions it is an immersive audio monologue that encourages us to look and think differently about an everyday object.

In A Little Drape of Heaven, however, rather than finding our own venue to enjoy the performance, we’re asked to find an appropriate prop. At the beginning, we (the listener) are asked to go to a cupboard – not, I hasten to add, to sit inside to listen to the play! – and find an item of clothing to hold onto as we listen. We are particularly encouraged to find a piece of clothing that belongs to a gender other than our own, and then follow the exhortation to ‘Hold it close to your heart’.

Our narrator here is a sari, a glorious piece of fabric made as a wedding garment but passed through generations to be worn by others. At some point in its history, the sari was discovered by a young boy, whose fascination with the garment is almost a forbidden passion. It is not a piece of clothing intended for a young boy, and yet it draws him with its tactile finery.

Das’s performance is, itself, ‘a little drape of heaven’, lingering on descriptions of being worn with silken tones that speak of a sensuous – almost sexual at times – experience. Dattani’s writing is lyrical and evocative, meaning that, no matter what item of clothing we took from our cupboard to hold, we can picture the beauty and splendour of the sari as she speaks.

As I’ve said, this is quite a different piece to Tree Confessions, and this becomes apparent in the second half. There is a very definitive narrative being told here, though it is easy to lose sight of this as you lose yourself in the more luxurious poetry of the descriptions of the sari being handled and worn. I don’t want to give anything away, but the story that is being told in A Little Drape of Heaven is probably not the one you think is being told. What I will say is that the monologue’s conclusion is a remarkably satisfying ending, and, by revealing the ‘other’ story that lay behind the one we thought we were listening to, A Little Drape of Heaven encourages listeners to imagine that other narrative long after the piece has finished.

A Little Drape of Heaven is a captivating piece, with a compelling performance and an innovative storytelling style. As with Tree Confessions, this is really a piece to lose yourself in, and I thoroughly recommend you check it out at a future festival if you get the chance.

Tree Confessions and A Little Drape of Heaven were 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 that were on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: After Shark (Lita Doolan Productions, GM Fringe)

July 2022
Digital Event

The Greater Manchester Fringe ran throughout July, with performances at various venues around Greater Manchester and online. I’ve been 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 GMF Digital Events strand on this year’s Fringe programme.

The production I’m going to be reviewing was available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing After Shark, a play by Lita Doolan Productions. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 5th August, but here’s the blog version…

After Shark is a short film, written by Lita Doolan and featuring Jo Phillips-Lane, Julie Broadbent, Sara Haggerty and Ian McShee, which is inspired by true events. Earlier this year, the body of a rare Greenland shark was discovered in Newlyn in Cornwall, and this event is the springboard for the story told in After Shark. One of the film’s characters, Meg (played by Julie Broadbent) discovers the shark in the harbour and attempts to return it to the ocean. Later, she sees the shark again and realizes it hasn’t survived.

That said, the shark storyline is only a very small part of After Shark. Despite the show’s title and blurb, the discovery of the Greenland shark is only a fragment of the overall story, and the film doesn’t linger for long on Meg’s discovery.

After Shark is actually a story – told through fragments and snippets, often floating free of context or exposition – of a group of people who are reacting, in one way or another, to changes in their lives and in their environment.

The piece is presented through a range of filmic techniques. The opening shots use an animated backdrop, which soon gives way to filmed scenes. However, the filmed scenes we see rarely show us characters or action. Instead, the majority of the film is a montage of recordings of bookshelves, streets, pavements, the harbour, filmed in a naturalistic style as though captured on a smartphone while a character is moving around their environment. Over the top of this footage, voiceovers narrate moments in the characters’ lives, usually as one half of a conversation with an unseen and unheard other. It’s an interesting technique, and one that is both disorienting and intriguing. It keeps us at a distance from the characters, denying a chance to ‘know’ them fully, but it also weaves together a series of fragments that promise to reveal a bigger picture.

The shark anecdote from Meg is – obviously – one that jumps out as significant. But elsewhere other characters share tiny stories of their own that hint at a similar significance. For instance, Shona – one of the characters who does appear on screen, recording her narrative via video calls – announces in her first short monologue that she has just received the keys to her first ever council house, but then explains that the previous tenant had kept pigeons. When the man died, the council didn’t know what to do with his pigeons and so left them closed into the property until they killed one another. It’s just a little snippet of Shona’s story, but it’s heavy with a sense of brutality and waste.

As I’ve said, the fragmentary effect of the short, contextless scenes of each character (coupled with the fact that we don’t generally see their faces on screen), along with the use of handheld camera footage that sometimes seems almost uncanny in its disembodiment, can often be disorienting. At times, the camera appears to follow the point-of-view of the person who is speaking, as when Meg walks down to the harbour, but at other times it offers a less coherent view. For instance, when one character (Chrissie) talks about being at an author event, the view we see is a canted shot of bookshelves in an apparently vacant bookshop.

There are hints here and there that the stories being told intersect with one another. Characters refer to one another, and it’s quite clear in some of her scenes that Meg is on the phone to Shona. Nevertheless, the connections are implicit, which also adds to the disorientation. There’s a boldness to the way After Shark denies its audience a comfortable narrative structure. We are never quite on solid ground with this one.

The overall effect of this is to focus audience attention on thematic, rather than narrative, connections. And there are a number of themes that come through quite strongly in the film.

Change is a key theme – almost all the characters are experiencing some sort of life change, to greater or lesser degree. Meg is looking for a new job, one that will allow her to continue her conservation and animal welfare volunteering. Chrissie is planning to sell her house in Newlyn and move to London to be closer to her daughter, whereas Shona has just moved into her first flat and is ‘starting from scratch again’. Roger and Zena (who, we learn part way through, is Chrissie’s daughter) are police officers who are facing conflicting pulls on their professional and personal identities. Some of these life changes are embraced willingly, others reluctantly, but all of them are redolent of an uncertain future.

Which brings me to another, perhaps more obvious, theme that is explored in After Shark: the environment. Environmental concerns are writ large across the film, in the visuals where most of the outdoor shots feature scattered litter and plastic bottles, and in the storyline where characters come together (in person and via Zoom) to take part in an environmental protest in London. Shona is a strident vegan who speaks of liberating farmed animals; Meg engages in low-key sabotage of the fishing industry by cutting nets at the harbour.

But ‘environment’ here doesn’t always just mean global concerns. Many of the characters speak of much more domestic anxieties. Whether it’s the council tenant filling his flat with pigeons, or Chrissie’s continuous (and possibly futile) battle against ragwort in the gardens along the coastal path, characters constantly gesture to an attempt at controlling their home environment and fashioning their own world in the way they want to see it. Chrissie speaks of a desire to let the younger generations see ‘pre-war Cornwall’ in Newlyn’s gardens, bringing together the film’s concern with change and with the environment.

Ultimately, none of the characters end up in the environment (in the broad sense) they expected to be in. Jobs are lost, protests go wrong, house moves fall through, family relationships are jeopardized. And, perhaps, it’s in this that we see the shark become more of an allegorical creature: like the poor lost fish doomed to die on Newlyn beach, the characters here all find themselves in unfamiliar, even dangerous, waters, facing an uncertain and unknown future.

Overall, After Shark is a thought-provoking short film. I’ll be honest and say that it suffers a little in terms of production quality – the video call sequences have poor quality audio, and some of the filmed footage is choppy and uneven – but the premise and the storytelling techniques are compelling. As I’ve said, the film resists a comfortable narrative structure, relying instead on a more fragmented approach, and this means that it also resists easy answers and trite exposition. After Shark emerges as a film to ponder on, and one which certainly bears multiple viewings.

After Shark was available to stream throughout the month of July, as part of the GMF Digital Events strand on this year’s Greater Manchester Fringe programme. For the full programme of Greater Manchester Fringe shows that were on this year, please visit the festival website.

Review: Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen (Terra Taylor Knudson)

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, including the Greater Manchester Fringe.

The production I’m going to be reviewing now is available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen, a performance by Terra Taylor Knudson. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 29th July, but here’s the blog version…

In a couple of my previous reviews (for Eliane Morel’s Disenchanted and Hear. Speak. See. by Expial Atrocious), I mentioned the variety of techniques and approaches used to create the pieces on the digital theatre strands of this year’s GM Fringe programme. Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen is yet another type of digital theatre – it’s a recording of a live stage version of the show in front of an audience. Quite a different experience to the ‘lockdown theatre’ faux video calls of Disenchanted or the immersive film experience of Hear. Speak. See., but it’s definitely an approach that works for Knudson’s show.

Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen is a one-woman show that charts Knudson’s relationship to William Shakespeare. And, just to say, it is always figured as a relationship: the title should give you a hint as to the casual familiarity with which Knudson treats the Bard and his work.

The play begins with Knudson performing Mistress Page’s monologue from The Merry Wives of Windsor. It’s a good performance, capturing the warmth and humour of Shakespeare’s character (as well as her acerbic tongue and assertiveness), and it makes for a compelling opener. Here is an actor who knows how to do Shakespeare, we think. Here is someone who knows what the words mean and can convey the sentiment behind them.

But Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen isn’t simply a chance to watch Knudson perform a series of Shakespeare’s monologues – though I have to admit that the opening scene suggests that would be a fun thing to watch. This is a much more personal journey, and Mistress Page’s words soon give way to a reminiscence about watching the play for the first time as a child.

Knudson’s story moves from her early introduction to the work of William Shakespeare, when she tentatively accepted that this might be something she could enjoy, to the beginning of the real ‘relationship’ in her high school years. Her narration is full of humour – sometimes at her own expense, sometimes at the expense of those around her, and often at the expense of Shakespeare himself. She speaks of teenage relationships and reimagines a scene of young heartbreak with herself as Ophelia and her no-good musician boyfriend as Hamlet, explaining that she was ‘living the great Shakespearean soap opera that we all live in high school’.

As Knudson’s personal narrative continues there are detours into the biography of the writer himself (told with an utterly irreverent humour that really reminds you that there are some weird gaps in Willy’s life story), and into the historical circumstances that informed much of his writing (including the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses and the birth of the Tudor Dynasty). I was a bit surprised to find – given the show’s title – that Knudson didn’t linger particularly on Elizabeth I and Shakespeare’s position as a specifically Elizabethan writer, but there is still a lot to enjoy about Knudson’s frenetic and funny take on over five centuries of English history, which singles out Elizabeth Woodville as a ‘Disney Princess’ and lingers on Joan of Arc’s betrayal by the Dauphin (almost as though this might be relevant later in the show). Obviously, as a Brit, I felt a moment of trepidation when the American on stage announced she was going to ‘explain’ a few centuries of our history, but all credit to Knudson – it’s a fun and affectionate take that will win over even the most patriotic audience member on this side of the pond.

At almost breakneck pace, Knudson takes the audience through this background material, which she explains she read about to better understand Shakespeare’s writing and its effect on her, and to her university years. Desperate to be an actor ever since that first experience of watching The Merry Wives of Windsor, Knudson explores the moment she was accepted into a performing arts college (though on a Production Management major rather than an acting course), and the trepidation she felt on moving away from home to a completely different state.

As the monologue moves into its second half – almost a second act – things take a darker turn, and we move from the rollicking ride through English history and Shakespeare’s life story into a much more serious narrative.

Knudson’s account of her time at college is a painful one, and while it begins by framing the experiences in terms of Shakespearean drama (including a disturbing reimagining of her college roommate and ‘torturer’ as a particularly unsettling version of Lady Macbeth), the story moves away from Shakespearean characters and into a nightmarishly personal narrative. This section of the show is heart-breaking to watch, and Knudson’s performance is captivating (in a chilling way), as she recreates or recaptures incredibly raw emotions. While there was a jokey reference to the ‘To be, or not to be’ speech earlier in the show, when this soliloquy eventually reappears, it carries so much more weight and is downright agonizing to watch.

Fortunately – and I don’t think this is a spoiler – Shakespeare saves the day in the end. Or rather, Knudson, supported by the love of the theatre that Shakespeare’s writing has given her, saves her own day. The play ends with jubilance and triumph, which feels like an apt testament to the writer-performer’s resilience, and to the near-magical way in which Shakespeare’s plays have continued to resonate and stay relevant through the centuries.

Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen is a joy to watch. Knudson is a talented and creative performer, and there’s something so natural in her delivery that it’s easy to forget this is a scripted show. The experience of watching a recording of a live performance was very enjoyable, but I must admit it made me a little jealous of the audience for that show. Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen is a very intimate show, and Knudson’s performance style is so charismatic and familiar, that I feel like seeing the show live would be a really satisfying experience. Maybe one day I’ll get to find out…

Despite my pang of jealousy towards the live show’s audience, I’m very pleased to discover that the Greater Manchester Fringe is actually the show’s international debut (because what finer Fringe is there to host this debut?). If you get chance to stream the show before the end of the GM Fringe, I recommend you do so. If not, it is going to be available to stream as part of the Edinburgh Fringe programme in August, and then the Sydney and Melbourne Fringes later in the year. And it’s definitely worth a watch.

Willy’s Lil Virgin Queen 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: Hear. Speak. See. (Expial Atrocious, 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 GMF Digital Events strand on this year’s Fringe programme.

The production I’m going to be reviewing now is available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing Hear. Speak. See., an immersive drama by Expial Atrocious. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 29th July, but here’s the blog version…

I mentioned in my previous review of Eliane Morel’s Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales that the digital theatre productions on this year’s festival programme are very varied, both in terms of their content and the ways they use the storytelling techniques facilitated by digital technologies.

A brief comparison of Disenchanted and Expial Atrocious’s Hear. Speak. See. reveals this variety beautifully. I’ve not really got space to do that comparison, so you really should watch both of these shows yourself to find out! Seriously.

Hear. Speak. See. is a short film production that uses video technology to create an unsettling immersive experience for the audience – and it’s clearly intended for individual viewers to stream in their own time, as it’s a show that very specifically denies a communal audience and privileges the perspective of the individual viewer.

Allow me to explain…

Hear. Speak. See. takes place at a dinner party. ‘You’ have been invited and have been told that it will be a dinner party like no other. And ‘you’ are the viewer – the film is shot from a first-person perspective, so the viewer becomes the guest at the dinner. When the three cast members address the fourth guest, they are addressing you, the viewer. It’s an immersive experience, but also a gloriously unsettling one.

And make no mistake, ‘gloriously unsettling’ is the best description of this piece of theatre, which packs a lot into its surprisingly short running time. It really is an immersive piece, and so it feels like you are at that dinner party for a long time.

The other guests at the party are played by Nic Lawton, Ez Holland and Faye Bingham (who also cowrote and codirected the piece). They are dressed in white costumes and are greeting one another – and you – as though this is a long-awaited catch-up with old friends.

But it clearly isn’t a catch-up with old friends. Not only do you (as you are now a character in the play) don’t recognize the others or understand the nature of the gathering, but there’s something off about the conversation. The interactions between the other three guests don’t flow smoothly, and there’s a tendency to non-sequiturs or almost nonsensical responses. The dynamic between the three is also hard to determine. At times, they chat to one another as though they see each other regularly, but at others they seem more distant, as though they are reunited after a long time. The only thing that is consistent is that they are determined the dinner party must happen, and that you must remain seated at the table with them.

In case it’s not clear from this description, we’re in the world of absurdist theatre with Hear. Speak. See. This is a piece that defies straightforward explanation or narrative exposition. Although some snippets of sound recordings at the beginning – which will be revisited towards the end – offer a tantalizing hint of context or backstory, there is a continued denial of both logic and progression. There isn’t a ‘story’ here, and nor can we really talk about ‘themes’, though ideas of justice and retribution echo through the performance, and there is a glimmer of exposition in the development of Bingham’s performance towards the end of the film. Ultimately, though, the film resists easy interpretation.

Characterization, too, is vague and uncertain. Lawton’s character appears to be the host of the event, and there are a number of references to the event being held in her house. (Of course, this doesn’t make complete sense, as at one point Holland moves around you and, as your perspective follows her movements, lights at the edge above her clearly reveal the edge of the set, undermining what little verisimilitude remained.) Holland’s character begins as a more gregarious, friendly fellow guest, but there are undertones of something more brittle beneath the surface. Bingham’s character almost appears to be in control at points, and is the most unequivocally hostile towards you (and towards Holland and Lawton’s characters too, at times).

Generally speaking, the hostility underlying Bingham’s interactions, and the party as a whole, isn’t overt. The more appropriate term would be menace, I feel. And, of course, this sense of menace, coupled with the explicitly ‘party’ setting encourages some comparison with Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. And this comparison would not be unfavourable either.

In addition to the verbal absurdity and confusion, which creates some of the atmosphere of menace, there is physical absurdity. The acting here is never naturalistic, but at times it becomes even more artificial – more consciously a performance – as the three actors suddenly move in choreographed synchronicity, or a physical altercation is played out through stylized but non-contact stage moves. There are brief, nightmarish cutaways in which the scene transforms into one of pain and agony, the performers contorted and screaming, for mere moments without explanation.

The performances here are really impressive. A highlight for me was the scene in which Bingham, Holland and Lawton eat plates of tomato bruschetta and salad leaves. That’s it – that’s all that happens – and the scene goes on for so long it’s downright uncomfortable to watch (and this is one of the moments in the play that really distorts the audience’s sense of the play’s overall running time). This scene really is a thing of absurd, disturbing, almost grotesque beauty, constantly gesturing to something beyond the performance – a theme? a backstory? an interpretation of events? – without actually explaining it.

Towards the end of the piece, we begin to get a clearer sense of what might have provoked or enabled the party to be thrown, as well as an idea of the role Bingham’s character plays in this. However, this isn’t really an answer, as our understanding of what, exactly, the party actually is continues to be elusive. Who or what Lawton and Holland’s characters are, and why they are involved is even more uncertain as the play moves towards its conclusion.

If, like me, you’re a fan of the Theatre of the Absurd, then Hear. Speak. See. is definitely one to watch. It’s a gem of a piece – visually stylish, bafflingly disturbing and with pitch-perfect performances from the cast. If Theatre of the Absurd isn’t something you know much about, or if you don’t count yourself as a fan, I’d still say give it a go. The short running time (despite it feeling way longer) allows a somewhat easier introduction to this style of theatre than full-length plays, and who knows? that visual style and those pitch-perfect performances might just win you over to the absurd side.

I know I quite often end my reviews by saying that the piece I’m talking about is a recommendation or a strong recommendation. And I make no apologies for that – I see some good stuff! But in this case I’m going to go even further and say that Hear. Speak. See. is one of my highlights of this year’s festival, and I’m very glad I got to see it.

Hear. Speak. See. is available to stream throughout the month of July, as part of the GMF Digital Events 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: On Me (Dangerous to Know, GM Fringe)

Wednesday 27 July 2022
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.

Review: Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales (Eliane Morel, 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, including the Greater Manchester Fringe.

The production I’m going to be reviewing now is available to stream with a ticket purchase from the Greater Manchester Fringe website throughout the month of July. I’m reviewing Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales, a performance by Eliane Morel. The radio version of this review will be broadcast on The Festival Show on Friday 29th July, but here’s the blog version…

Disenchanted is a one-woman show (though not a one-character show by any means), written and performed by Eliane Morel. It opens on a title card, telling us we’re in Paris in 1699, and a voiceover introduces us to the salon of Madame d’Aulnoy (played, as all the characters are, by Morel).

There are a good number of digital theatre productions on this year’s GM Fringe programme. Some are part of the C ARTS strand, and some have been produced for the GMF Digital Events strand. I saw three of these productions back-to-back this week, which was a good way to dispel any preconceptions that ‘digital theatre’ is a homogenous thing or that it doesn’t offer endless opportunities for innovation and creativity. The three digital theatre events I saw this week were all very different, not least in the different film formats they used for their productions.

Morel’s Disenchanted is what we might call ‘lockdown theatre’, the sort of digital theatre we saw a lot of in 2020-21. By this I mean, it uses a faux video conference format that is self-conscious about its restrictions. In this case, Morel draws a historical connection to make the ‘lockdown theatre’ format make sense. Paris has been struck by plague, and Madame d’Aulnoy is unable to invite visitors to her salon. She consults the Magic Mirror (also played by Morel, and appearing in split screen) who introduces her to ‘magic’ that will allow her to speak to visitors remotely. It will also allow Madame to ‘swipe down’ on the – presumably – mirror to contact her guests for the evening – all of whom are characters from fairy tales.

I’ve referred to this format as ‘faux’ video conferencing, as of course it isn’t actually recorded on a conference platform. This is a film – performed, recorded, edited – and so when Madame ‘swipes down’, we are actually cutting to a different scene and Morel is able to let her characters interact with one another as a result.

‘Lockdown theatre’ was born of necessity, but it always contained the potential for intervention and innovation. Morel explores this potential through the visual techniques used to enhance the performances, including animation, overlaying, colourful backgrounds and subtitling. The overall effect is a film that, while giving a nod to the social restrictions in which it was created (and a nod to historical parallels to those restrictions), is a rich and enjoyable visual experience that feels complete (i.e. not like we’re missing out on something).

I seem to have said a lot about the format there! I think watching three productions in quick succession – and I will be reviewing the other two shortly as well – really draws your attention to the varied ways performers and companies use the technologies available. That said, I really do need to say something about the actual story of Disenchanted now!

Madame d’Aulnoy has invited five characters from fairy tales to attend her (virtual) salon and tell their story through the medium of song. The Magic Mirror is excited to hear that they will be meeting ‘princes and princesses’, but Madame is quick to disabuse him of this. She has invited minor characters, ones who don’t usually get to tell their tales. The intention, it is clear, is to offer a different perspective on well-known tales. As this is something many other writers have done over the years, I was curious to see whether Morel really could give us something fresh.

And I was not disappointed! There is some real originality in Disenchanted, and some surprising ‘twists’ on the tales.

Our first visitor/performer is Olga, one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. We’re probably on familiar territory here, as there have been a number of retellings of Cinderella from her stepsisters’ perspective over the years. Morel’s Olga is a lively creation though, singing us through her story of poverty, social climbing, jealousy and resentment. The performance is comical, particularly as it ends with a coda explaining that Cinderella and Prince Charming later decided to ‘consciously uncouple’ from the Royal Family and wondering if Prince Charming’s ‘disreputable divorced uncle’ might offer another opportunity for Olga and her sister to marry into royalty after all. But Morel’s character here is also charmingly human. I enjoyed the fact that she avoids rewriting the story to make the ugly sisters the victims of the story, but rather to add context to their circumstances that might explain – if not excuse – their mistreatment of their stepsister. Olga is spiteful and selfish, but she’s also rather engaging in her resilience and ambition (and Cinderella does come off as just as ambitious and self-preserving as her sisters here). It’s hard not to enjoy Olga’s gleeful plan to ‘live the life we choose / In our gigantic shoes!’ at the end of the song.

From here, Morel’s takes get a little less familiar and a lot more surprising. We meet Gertie, the goose liberated by Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk, who sings about ‘going free-range’ and starting a union of golden egg laying fairy tale geese. The unexpected message of her song is that ‘you are the controller of the means of your production’.

Next, we meet Mr Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood who offers us a very different interpretation of events from that story – and it’s this sequence that necessitates the warning that this is not a show for children – that is a lot of fun. And then the final performance is from Sleeping Beauty, the only princess who appears in Disenchanted, who reminds us that, while she is the title character of the story, much of Sleeping Beauty is about things done to the princess, rather than things done by her. In a rather polemic take on the story, Morel reframes Sleeping Beauty’s encounter with Prince Charming as non-consensual molestation (actually, that’s not really reframing it, is it? that’s actually what happens) and has her sing ‘Listen, pal, #MeToo’ before realizing that other fairy tale princesses have endured similar abuse.

For me, though, the absolute highlight of Disenchanted was the character that came between Mr Wolf and Sleeping Beauty. ‘Angelique’ (Morel supplies a name for a usually nameless character) is one of the dead wives of Bluebeard, and she tells her story – and those of Bluebeard’s other victims – in a plaintive song set to the tune of ‘Sway With Me’. It’s a genuinely haunting and moving number, and the effect is heightened by the use of visual editing techniques to overlay and impose multiple faces on screen, reminding us that this is the story of more than one woman. Morel’s make-up here is unsettling – particularly coming immediately after the comical stylings of Mr Wolf – and it’s striking that this is the only character who doesn’t interact with Madame d’Aulnoy or the audience during their appearance.

Morel has an impressively operatic vocal range, which she puts to good use in the performances in Disenchanted, varying the style as the songs and stories require and dipping into more informal tones for comedic or conversational effect. Again, a highlight for me was the ‘Angelique’ number, in which Morel uses her distinctive vocal style to striking effect.

Overall, Disenchanted is a fun cabaret-style story that encourages us to think differently about well-known fairy tales. The way certain themes from Morel’s reimaginings weave together, and the way she incorporates bits of Madame d’Aulnoy’s own biography, give Disenchanted a coherence that makes this show both a cabaret and a narrative in its own right.

I really enjoyed this production of Disenchanted – it worked really well as a piece of digital theatre. I believe that Morel has performed a live version of the show this year as well (in Australia), and I would love to see that version as well. Seeing Morel transform from one character to the next without the aid of video technology would be something to see! Those of us outside Australia may have to wait for this opportunity, but in the meantime, I highly recommend checking out the digital version of this show.

Disenchanted: A Cabaret of Twisted Fairy Tales 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: Totally Trucked (Katie Damer, GM Fringe)

Wednesday 20 July 2022
The Peer Hat, Manchester

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 Wednesday 20th July, I was at The Peer Hat to review Totally Trucked, a one-woman show by Katie Damer. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 22nd July, but here’s the blog version…

As I mentioned in a previous review, the one-act solo monologue is a standard format at the Fringe, with a lot of performers using it to good effect. Totally Trucked, written and performed by Katie Damer, is one such monologue, and this was the next show I saw at the festival.

Damer’s monologue opens with a very short video clip, presented without context, before we switch our attention to the performer on stage. Damer is lying on the floor, as though in bed. As she begins her super-charged delivery (and I’ll come back to that in a moment), we learn that this is Damer as a teenager, snoozing her alarm clock and almost being late for school.

Although I’ll continue to describe Totally Trucked as a monologue – which it is, as Damer carries the entirety of the performance, with the exception of brief recorded voices with which she interacts – I wouldn’t want to give the impression that this is a static soliloquy. Far from it. Damer moves around the relatively small stage space at The Peer Hat with frenetic energy, acting out scenes from her story and conjuring up little vignettes despite the absence of set-dressing, props or other actors.

The story – which is an autobiographical one – begins with Damer’s rather ordinary teenage life. She explains several times that it was ordinary, that she might have had some quirks and foibles as a teenager but otherwise was on a fairly standard path. That’s not to say it’s not a funny and engaging story, or that Damer isn’t rather likable in her self-effacing account of her past life, but it is a pretty straightforward account of being at school.

And that’s sort of the point. The opening – the ordinariness of Damer’s life up to the age of fifteen – is really lining us up for a sucker punch. One day, while riding her bike home from school, Damer was hit by a truck. Her injuries left her with complex regional pain syndrome and a warning from her doctors that she likely wouldn’t walk unaided again. The show – which the audience can’t help but notice is being performed by an actor who is walking unaided, as well as leaping on and off a chair and giving a high-energy physical performance of her narrative – is about what happened next.

I described Damer’s performance style as ‘super-charged’, and I think this is the most accurate description. Her delivery is incredibly fast-paced and there’s almost a relentlessness to the way she narrates her story. She’s also not afraid of the odd bit of emotional whiplash – after delivering some of the rawer, more hard-hitting aspects of the story, she pauses for the merest of beats before launching into a bawdy tale of vodka, one-night-stands and ‘the best night of my life’. Totally Trucked is an absolute whirlwind of a performance, and it will leave you reeling in places.

This delivery style is very appropriate for the show’s content, however. This is a story about a young person – a child, really – who has their life turned upside-down and their future thrown into question. As Damer narrates her experiences of going to college and then to university – experiences that are accompanied by heightened emotions at the best of times – the pace of delivery matches the chaos of post-traumatic stress responses, self-destructive coping mechanisms, grief and tentative independence.

For all this evocation of chaos, Damer’s performance is deceptively measured. The relentlessness is very carefully choreographed, which gives the moments when the narrative stops abruptly real weight. The collision with the truck itself is particularly well-presented, evoking the emotional – rather than the physical – experience. As the show progresses, moments of silence or hesitancy come in when Damer re-enacts appointments with doctors and therapists, and a harrowing announcement from a university lecturer at the beginning of a class. The show’s final moment of painful quiet – and I won’t spoil this, as it’s pretty hard-hitting and somewhat unexpected – has a real power to it, and on the night I attended it left most of the audience in tears.

It has to be said, Totally Trucked goes to some pretty dark places, and often with little warning as to how dark it’s going to go. Nevertheless, it really isn’t a bleak play. That relentlessness that can seem so chaotic and overwhelming is actually driving us on towards an uplifting conclusion, one which has real heart and soul rather than schmaltzy inspirational morals.

This isn’t a story about one woman overcoming adversity or learning important lessons about the human condition. In some respects, Damer appears to learn very little through the course of her narrative. The drinking and sleeping around she proudly announces as habits of her teenage years continue as she enters her twenties. And she offers no advice or instructions on how to manage a chronic pain condition.

Instead of focusing on lessons to be learnt, Damer’s narrative moves us towards a sense of realization. Damer doesn’t end by suddenly learning something new, but rather clarifying something she already knew.

The latter part of the story increasingly focuses on how Damer feels towards other people, and the love and empathy that characterize her close relationships. Again, this is presented rather relentlessly, so these positive emotions sometimes threaten to overwhelm as much as the negative ones. Yet it’s in this acknowledgement, not of self-love and self-reliance, but of how much Damer loves her friends and family that the story finds its equilibrium. This is powerful, but also rather refreshing.

And this aspect, unlike some of the bleaker moments of the play, is not a sucker punch. Looking back at Damer’s narrative, there is so much warmth towards others that the final affirmations of love shouldn’t come as a surprise. Damer offers comical, somewhat mocking, portraits of family members, friends and her local pub (which, funnily enough, is my local pub, though I can neither confirm nor deny the description of it as ‘a budget Phoenix Nights), but each of these is infused with tangible affection. For a play that deals so frankly with the isolation and depression that comes with an incurable pain condition, Totally Trucked is unexpectedly full of human connection.

Totally Trucked is an exhausting, funny, harrowing and jubilant play. The fact that it crams all that into just one hour is testament not simply to Damer’s incredibly energetic performance style, but also the assured narrative drive and direction of the show. The painful autobiographical elements will stick with you for a while afterwards, but so too will Damer’s confident and engaging performance. With another show coming up in August – which promises to be very different (Dots and Dashes: A Bletchley Park Musical) – Katie Damer really does look to be one to watch.

Totally Trucked was on at The Peer Hat on 18th-20th 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: We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret (Blue Balloon Theatre, GM Fringe)

Tuesday 19 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 Tuesday 19th July, I was at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to review We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret by Blue Balloon Theatre. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 22nd July, but here’s the blog version…

So, I started this year’s Fringe by seeing Pill by Rebecca Phythian, one half of Blue Balloon Theatre. The other co-founder of Blue Balloon is Jas Nisic, and We Need to Talk is her piece at this year’s festival – so it seemed right (especially after enjoying Pill) to go and see it and complete the pair!

We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret is a very different type of show to Pill, which was a solo monologue with autobiographical experience. We Need to Talk is a musical performance – as it says in the title, it’s a ‘jazz cabaret’.

Specifically, Nisic tells the story of a break-up through jazz, lounge and torch songs, interspersed with storytelling narration. It’s an ambitious performance – and I should add that I saw the show on the hottest day in Britain since records began, which made it a very ambitious performance. The show last two hours, with two short intervals and two costume changes, and for most of that time Nisic is singing. I have to take my hat off to her for getting through this on Tuesday night (though I also have to take my hat off to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for managing to maintain a perfectly pleasant temperature inside the venue for the audience!).

Nisic – accompanied by Dave Cavendish on piano – performs a repertoire of classic songs of the twentieth century that move through the various emotions of a relationship and relationship breakdown. I imagine all the songs will be reasonably familiar to audiences, and it’s easy to imagine the emotional trajectory of the selected numbers (in fact, I’m willing to bet you can already guess a couple of the songs that were included even if you didn’t see the show). This is significant for reasons I’ll come back to shortly.

First thing’s first… Nisic can really sing. I’ve heard her perform a couple of her own compositions before, which were in a more contemporary style. But now that I’ve seen We Need to Talk, it’s clear to me that she has a voice that’s perfectly suited to the rich contralto resonances of jazz, and with the power to really supply the force needed for some of the more emotional elements. Nisic’s singing alone was enough to make We Need to Talk an enjoyable show – but that’s not the only selling point here.

Nisic’s performance was charmingly idiosyncratic. Or idiosyncratically charming. I’m not sure which is the best way to describe it.

As We Need to Talk begins, she bounds up to the microphone in a short, sort of 60s-style dress, chunky black boots with love hearts on them, and flicked black eyeliner. As the first number begins, she shouts a greeting to the audience (with the obligatory repeated requests for a more enthusiastic response) before gleefully announcing, ‘Isn’t being in love sick?’ in an unmistakably Manc accent.

Nisic’s narration of the relationship and its breakdown continues in this style. Littered with colloquialisms, plenty of swearing, a few references to bodily functions (including a bit of a gross description of the aftereffects of a £9.99 deal at a Chinese buffet) and pop culture touchstones that include Game of Thrones, Friends and the Build-a-Bear workshop. It’s funny, in-your-face and very relatable – Nisic keeps the details of the relationship just on the right side of vague (including the gender of the former partner), allowing the audience ample opportunity to superimpose their own experiences onto the narrative.

And this is important, as there’s a feeling of universality to We Need to Talk. As the title reveals, the show isn’t concerned with narrating a unique individual story, but rather at gesturing to something more universal. I don’t know anyone who has ever actually used the words ‘We need to talk’ to signal the end of a relationship, but the words are such a recognizable shorthand that we all know what they mean. Similarly, the trajectory of the break-up story being told is also recognizable – the desperation, the bottles of wine, the tubs of ice cream, the cringeworthy messages, the new flame, the rebound date, the attempt at reconciliation, are threaded together in a way that we can understand and, even if we haven’t done those exact things ourselves, relate to.

Which brings us on to the songs… It might seem like an odd choice to combine a sweary, shouty, down-to-earth story about a definitively twenty-first-century break-up with old jazz standards by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Julie London, but it really does work here.

On the one hand, there’s a real charm to the way Nisic (or her on-stage persona, at least) narrates her own heartbreak and humiliation through the somewhat elevated medium of classic jazz and blues standards. In the grand scheme of break-ups, the one being described is pretty mundane, but the musical accompaniment gives a light-hearted grandiosity that lifts it out of its ordinariness.

But on the other hand, We Need to Talk really emphasizes the power of the songs being performed. How amazing is it that, in 2022, ‘Cry Me a River’ (the Julie London song, not the Justin Timberlake one) is still a go-to break-up song? That people can still listen to it and think, ‘This song is totally about me’? Some of the songs that Nisic performs are even older – ‘All of Me’ is over 90 years old, and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ is nearly 100 years old. For these songs to still be able to form the soundtrack to the end of a relationship is pretty impressive. Nisic’s powerful performance of the numbers really underlines their continued cultural and emotional resonance.

I’ve commented on Nisic’s vocal abilities, but this was only part of the musical performance. We Need to Talk isn’t simply a narration punctuated by musical numbers. Instead, Nisic makes the songs part of the narration, incorporating them fully into her story. Although clearly well able to perform the songs ‘straight’, Nisic often interposes her own style to underline the significance or relevance of the song she’s singing (or for comedy effect, of course) – she slips into a more Mancunian delivery of lines in places, or emphasizes certain words and lines to make a point. Highlights for me were a particularly frenetic performance of ‘All of Me’ in a desperate attempt to ‘bribe’ the soon-to-be ex-partner to stay, followed by the sad resignation of a quieter, more vulnerable performance of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. I also enjoyed the comedic performance of ‘Fever’ to narrate a drunken rebound date, which gets more lascivious and slurred as the song goes on. And as I’ve already noted, ‘Cry Me a River’ makes an appearance when the ex reappears seeking reconciliation. The almost confrontational style in which this one is performed is very good fun to watch.

We Need to Talk is a truly joyful show with a lot of charm. Nisic’s stage persona is endearing and relatable, and her vocal performances are impressive and assured. Ultimately, the experience of watching We Need to Talk is a bit like watching a friend go through a break-up, but a friend who’s really good at singing jazz.

One of the things I enjoy about the Fringe Festival is the rollercoaster of emotions you go on as you work your way through the programme. Each performance can elicit such different emotional responses. With We Need to Talk, the overriding emotion is happiness – at the end of the day, this is a show that will make you smile. And if you’ve endured a gruelling day of unprecedented temperatures, stuffy workplaces and fraying tempers, what more could you possibly want?

We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret was on at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 19th and 20th 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: 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.