Review: The Yank is a Manc! My Ancestors and Me (Hopwood DePree, GM Fringe)

Friday 5th July 2019
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester

This year’s Greater Manchester Fringe runs from 1st-31st July, and I’m reviewing a selection of shows on this year’s programme for this blog and for North Manchester FM. My second show of the festival was on Friday 5th July, when I saw Hopwood DePree perform his one-man comedy storytelling show, The Yank is a Manc!: My Ancestors and Me. I’ll be playing my radio review of the show on Saturday’s Hannah’s Bookshelf. But here’s the blog version…

The Yank is a Manc! is the true story of Hopwood DePree’s relocation from Los Angeles to Middleton, to save the Grade II*-listed Hopwood Hall. I’ve been following the story with interest for a while, and Hopwood was actually the first guest I had on my local history show on North Manchester (A Helping of History), back in November 2017, shortly after the show began. I also caught up with Hopwood again for my Hannah’s Bookshelf Greater Manchester Fringe Special at the end of June. So I’ve heard a bit of the background to the show’s backstory. It’s certainly an unusual tale, but it’s also been a great boost for the historic building, which has been at serious risk for some time.

This Summer, Hopwood is touring a one-man show (part stand-up comedy, part storytelling) about his decision to move to the UK, his experiences at the hall (and in Manchester and Middleton generally), and the challenges faced by what he amiably describes as the ‘home restoration from Hell’. The show opens with a short video montage to fill in the background for the uninitiated, and further pictures appear occasionally to illustrate the story. These are a nice mixture of jokey images and genuine pictures of the hall and its current condition.

The one-hour show is funny, affectionate and occasionally absurd (but always on just the right side of believable). Much of the humour comes from the fish-out-of-water situation of the ‘Yank’ arriving in ‘Manc’. As you might expect, there are plenty of jokes about cultural misunderstandings, on the ‘two countries separated by a common language’ lines. An early bit about trying to buy a sweater sets the tone – minor vocabulary differences tumble into a bigger mix-up, with Hopwood presenting himself as the wide-eyed, baffled stranger in a strange land. The show is less ‘you people are crazy’, than a self-deprecating wander through the little absurdities of Hopwood’s unorthodox relocation.

The Yank is a Manc! is a very funny show – I particularly enjoyed the description of Hopwood’s first Bonfire Night – but it is also suffused with an engaging affection and openness. While Hopwood makes his passion for saving the historic building clear, what really comes through is a fondness for the building’s idiosyncrasies – and the idiosyncrasies of the other people involved in the project, and of Middleton/Manchester/Rochdale as a whole. Frequently laughing at himself – there are a number of jokes about spray tans and teeth whitening – Hopwood leaves the audience with the feeling that, mad as his project is, he wouldn’t actually want to be anywhere else.

Watching the show in Manchester, with an audience including a number of people from Middleton, there was a pleasing familiarity to the story and the humour. A couple of jokes seem to revolve around particularly Manc or Northern expressions and characteristics (and Hopwood’s occasional switches between calling his new home ‘Manchester’ and calling it ‘Rochdale’ will make perfect sense to people from Middleton). However, the show was actually first performed at Brighton Fringe, and it will be going on to Camden and Edinburgh next month. It’d be interesting to know what audiences from slightly further afield make of the story – I suspect the humour will still hit home, as I don’t believe you need to know Midd to enjoy the comedy of the situations described. Still, I think Middletonians (and North Mancs generally) will feel a particular possessiveness.

As well as tales of linguistic confusion, heritage architecture, and local history, The Yank is a Manc! also conjures up some of the slightly larger-than-life characters that have played a part in the story of Hopwood Hall. We get a glimpse of Hopwood’s LA agent Sheila (and her sound-a-like assistant Ken) and her bemusement at her client’s new career direction, as well as small nuggets of motherly advice and wisdom from a parent who believes her son is having a mid-life crisis. And we get to meet Geoff (a local historian) and Bob (the long-time caretaker of the hall), who flit between looking after Hopwood and tormenting him for being a ‘Yank’.

I have enough inside knowledge – like most people involved in local history in the North Manchester area – to know that Geoff and Bob are real people. In fact, I’ve met Geoff, and he is indeed an incredible local historian, and I have no doubt that he did indeed furnish all the in-depth information about the hall that Hopwood references throughout the show. However, it would also be fair to say that the ‘Geoff’ and ‘Bob’ we are treated to on stage are also characters, based on real people but with a pinch of poetic licence for the show. This is done very well, as Hopwood avoids lazy caricature throughout his presentation of the two Middleton men – again, there is a real sense of affection and warmth – and show a good talent for character construction and dialogue, as well as great comic timing.

Overall, The Yank is a Manc! is an uplifting show that is both funny and sweet. It’s a great story, told with humour and charm. I defy anyone not to be rooting for the historic manor house and its unconventional guardian by the end.

The Yank is a Manc! My Ancestors and Me is on at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, on 3rd-6th July, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe. It also will be on in August at the Camden and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. To see the full programme for this year’s GM Fringe, visit the festival website.

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

Tuesday 2nd July 2019
The Whiskey Jar, Manchester

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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