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.
