Review: HYENAS! (Sugar Butties, GM Fringe)

Monday 11 July 2022
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

The Greater Manchester Fringe is on throughout July at various venues around Greater Manchester. And, as usual, 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 Monday 11th July, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre to see a double bill from Sugar Butties. In my last review, I talked about The Olive Tree, the first half of that double bill, so now it’s time to turn to the second half, HYENAS! The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 15th July, but here’s the blog version…

Like the first half of this double bill, The Olive Tree, HYENAS! is a one-act, one-woman show. It’s written and performed by Olivia Nicholson, and it’s set on a hen weekend in Spain.

As the show opens, Nicholson walks into the room in a short, sequinned dress, face plastered in makeup, greeting the audience as though we were fellow guests at the party. I can’t remember exactly which song was playing as she entered, but I’m sure you can imagine the soundtrack that was used here. ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ was one of the very evocative numbers used, for instance.

Nicholson plays four characters in HYENAS!, transitioning seamlessly between them. She is Kirsty (the bride-to-be), Lauren (her friend from work), Sarah (a mousy schoolteacher who seems out of her depth with the other hens) and Tasha (who is a bit more cougar than hyena, truth be told). The first character we meet is Lauren, who walks around the room, asking us all how we know the bride-to-be and sharing some little stories of her own.

I’ll get this out of the way now – like The Olive Tree, HYENAS! involves audience participation, and not always of the gentler kind. Nicholson puts audience members on the spot, asking questions like ‘How do you know Kirsty?’ that requires them to improvise a response in front of everyone. At one point, Lauren greets Kirsty, and an audience member has to improvise as an actual character from the play. I have to say, I think this type of audience participation works better in HYENAS! than in The Olive Tree, but that’s because it has a more confrontational style from the off. Unlike the gentle intimacy of Forrest’s confessional storytelling, the hen night setting of HYENAS! immediately evokes the potential for discomfort and tension (playing with the stereotype of such an event).

Initially, Lauren also seems something of a stereotype. Her mode of speech and mannerisms (particularly the way Nicholson mimes her sucking on the straw of her cocktail, which is 100% played for laughs) are exaggerated and caricatured. And while you might be forgiven for thinking that you’ve seen this all before (at first anyway), there are three very good reasons for the exaggeration.

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it allows Nicholson to show off her undoubted talents as a comic performer. While these characters are stereotypes, she captures them beautifully with pitch-perfect timing.

Secondly, the OTT construction of the characters allows the audience to clearly distinguish between the four of them. There are no costume or makeup changes as Nicholson transitions from one character to the next; they’re differentiated by her performance, not by physical appearance. This was done very well – there were no points where Nicholson slipped and, for example, accidentally said a Sarah line in a Lauren voice, or missed a character’s trademark mannerism.

But it’s the third reason that really appealed to me. Of course, none of the characters are, actually, the caricatures we believe them to be. In each case, the brash comedy character is concealing something darker and more painful. This isn’t necessarily unexpected – ‘tears of a clown’ is, after all, a staple of many darkly comedic performances – but it is done well here.

Lauren’s character is an in-your-face mixture of vapidity and rudeness. But another side emerges when she removes herself from the party and goes into the toilets. I won’t spoil anything here, but she has a phone conversation with her husband that goes to a very different place than I was expecting and was surprisingly moving.

Sarah and Tasha also have hidden depths, though Nicholson plays with different ways of revealing these. The character Sarah acts out her secret pain in a flashback that is laugh-out-loud funny – almost farcical – but framed by a hard edge of very real anguish and subtle detail that precedes the flashback, which conjures something really rather unpleasant. Nicholson performs this scene very quickly after Sarah’s first appearance, meaning that the audience’s reaction to her subsequent scenes is always informed by it.

Tasha is presented in a different way. Her backstory – the potential darkness that lies behind her sexually voracious and not particularly pleasant exterior – comes through a rather louche monologue (supposedly a dialogue, though the other participant doesn’t respond) in which she explains her past relationship history. This is very much a story told through implication and hint, and it ends with a somewhat unsettling punchline.

But, as one would expect on a hen weekend, it’s the bride who gets the most attention. Kirsty is even more of a caricature than Lauren at first glance. Her pout, her girly intonation, her repeated refrain of ‘jokes’, her bridezilla demand that everyone wear the same little red dress on a night out all work to convey a character we think we already know.

However, it is probably Kirsty who has the most depth here. Nicholson reveals Kirsty’s backstory in a fragmented, distorted way. We learn early on that her mother has passed away, but later in the play are hints that there is something else, something even darker, to the story. A light-hearted Mr and Mrs quiz, in which the questions (written, fortunately, not improvised) are read out by members of the audience, gives an indication that the groom-to-be might not be the catch Kirsty has been making out. We see more of this later in the play, as Kirsty’s story culminates in a monologue delivered over the top of the karaoke song she’s supposed to be singing. For a play that’s so loud and in-your-face, the amount that’s left unsaid is impressive.

Overall, I really enjoyed HYENAS! And it is a great companion piece to The Olive Tree. The two shows complement each other beautifully. Both use comedy – often physical, parodic or caricatured comedy – to good effect, but the comedy is deceptive. There is real pain behind the laughs in both plays, though The Olive Tree uses its bittersweet narrative style to present pain as a life experience from which one can learn and change, and HYENAS! has a more raw, unhealed pain that screams, rather than cries, behind the laughter.

Like Forrest in The Olive Tree, Nicholson is an assured performer. And while I may not have been entirely comfortable with all the elements of audience participation in the two shows, it should be acknowledged that it’s a mark of two confident and prepared performers that they would risk it!

Ultimately, The Olive Tree and HYENAS! are both plays that get to grips with something about the human condition, though with different styles and tones. I really enjoyed this double bill and I’m looking forward to seeing what Sugar Butties do next. I enjoyed seeing Forrest and Nicholson’s solo pieces, but I think I’d also enjoy seeing them perform together in the future.

HYENAS! was on at the King’s Arms Theatre on 11th and 12th 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: The Olive Tree (Sugar Butties, GM Fringe)

Monday 11 July 2022
King’s Arms Theatre, Salford

The Greater Manchester Fringe 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 Monday 11th July, I was at the King’s Arms Theatre to review a double bill from Sugar Butties. I’m going to be reviewing the two pieces separately, so first up is The Olive Tree (written and performed by Jessica Forrest). The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 15th July, but here’s the blog version…

The Olive Tree is a one-act solo show, written and performed by Jessica Forrest. It’s a deeply personal show, using monologue and sketches to present a series of vignettes that are linked by the theme of change (specifically, big life changes).

The show opens with Forrest sitting in a meditative pose on stage. I’m always impressed when actors choose to be on-stage, curtain-up as the audience takes their seats. It must take incredible concentration to remain so still and impassive in the face of the chatter and giggles of the arriving audience.

When the play begins, Forrest begins with an anecdote about seeing a ‘baba’ (a ‘spiritual grandfather’) sitting under a tree. This leads into an off-beat opening monologue about the inauthenticity of many supposed spiritual leaders. Forrest places herself into the monologue, explaining that the show is inspired by a series of life events she’s experienced, which have made her think more about the nature of change.

As I say, the storytelling here uses vignettes, but these are strung together chronologically – much as leaves and fairy lights are strung together behind Forrest as the only set dressing. (The bare stage and lack of dressing makes sense when you know that previous performances of The Olive Tree have been performed outdoors.) Each story is presented with some physical performance – Forrest dons a white dress and fairy wings for one piece, mimes looking after a baby in another, wanders around the stage as though it’s an Italian supermarket elsewhere, and so on.

The first story Forrest tells is about her experience of working as a nanny in London, and it explores and presents the difficult emotions of looking after – and coming to love – a child that isn’t your own. It begins as a rather light-hearted comical piece, including a part where Forrest pulls an audience member up to the stage to play the part of a toddler learning to walk (more on audience participation in a moment). But there’s a bit of a tonal sucker-punch towards the end of the story that gives it a depth and weight beyond the audience’s initial expectations. 

What follows is a more explicitly comedic sequence in which Forrest mimics a wealthy American socialite describing the experience of giving birth and being a new mother. This sequence – performed with increasingly frenetic and sharply parodic tone – offers a contrast to the previous one, but still delivers a bit of a hit as it reaches the climax of its absurdity.

This sense of tonal uncertainty characterizes much of the rest of the show as well, notably in some of the vignettes set after Forrest moved from London to Italy. For instance, she introduces a friend (and the friend’s sense of humour) through a humorous story about being tricked into showing a doctor’s letter to strangers in a supermarket. There’s a faster pace and more physical comedy in this section, but it gives way to a follow-up story, in which we’re told that the friend died a couple of years later.

The audience is able to navigate these emotional shifts – which are, at a couple of points, rather abrupt – because of Forrest’s performance style. She is, at all times, talking directly to the audience. She introduces the play and gives an idea of its content, and the vignettes and anecdotes are all presented in a storytelling style. The intimacy and sense of trust (i.e. the performer trusting the audience) this creates allows for the audience to feel comfortable when darker emotional experiences are evoked. Forrest doesn’t look distressed in telling them – any distress comes in ‘flashbacks’, scenes that are acted out but lack the immediacy of her direct address – so the audience is being encouraged to feel sympathy, but not discomfort. That’s not to say that Forrest doesn’t demonstrate range here, but rather that the piece has a coherence that’s apt for a one-act piece.

Now, I need to say something about audience participation here, as this was something that didn’t work as well as for me.

The promotional material for the play did warn that audience participation would be involved. However, it didn’t really give an indication of the type of audience participation that would be required. This was not a ‘join in if you like’ approach, but rather a direct singling out of individual audience members and expecting them to participate (physically and verbally) in the performance. For me, this didn’t really gel with the overall sense of comfort and trust that Forrest’s storytelling style evoked so well.

Speaking of trust, I mentioned that Forrest conveyed a sense of performer-audience trust that enhanced my enjoyment of the play. I was less sure about the assumption that this would work both ways. Before the play had really begun, Forrest indicated card tags and pencils on the tables in front of us and asked us each to write a personal and private story about change on a tag and give them to her. She assured us that these wouldn’t be read out, but we’d not really been given any reason to trust that assurance. The direct demands of audience participation didn’t inspire me to believe that these stories wouldn’t be used in some way, and the off-beat, somewhat unexpected storytelling style felt at odds with the request to share private information in a room full of strangers. (We were also asked to put glitter on our faces at the end of the performance, which almost all of us did, but I’m not really sure why we were doing it. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the play itself, but who can resist a bit of glitter?)

Uneasy audience participation aside, The Olive Tree was an enjoyable piece of theatre. Forrest is an assured performer, well able to deliver the hard emotional moments of the play in a way that evokes strong sympathies in the audience. Her poised and deceptively gentle storytelling style creates a confessional intimacy that draws the listener in to the quirky and rather unexpected tales of change that make up the play.

If anything, I think The Olive Tree could have been longer – though, admittedly, that’s a big ask of a solo performer! When it came to a close, I felt like I wanted to hear more, and that surely is the mark of a successful performance. But that was the end of the first part of a double-bill, so Forrest prepared to leave the stage, ready for the second half (which will be the subject of my next review).

The Olive Tree is a great piece of Fringe theatre and well worth a watch. It’s moving (but not in an over-the-top manipulative way), funny (in a bittersweet way) and intimate. If you get change to see it at another Fringe festival somewhere this year (like, I don’t know, Edinburgh), I’d definitely recommend you see it.

The Olive Tree was on at the King’s Arms Theatre on 11th and 12th 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.