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.
