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.

Review: No One is Coming to Save You (This Noise)

Sunday 30th June 2019
HOME, Manchester

Yesterday, I posted a review of Electrolyte, which I saw at HOME, Manchester as part of this year’s Incoming Festival. This is a review of the second festival production I saw that night: No One is Coming to Save You by This Noise. I’ll be reviewing both productions on North Manchester FM on Tuesday, but here’s the blog version of my review of No One is Coming to Save You…

It was interesting to watch No One is Coming to Save You immediately after seeing Electrolyte (which was on the bill on the same night), as the two productions are really quite different. While Electrolyte is a loud (even brash) piece of gig theatre, No One is Coming to Save You is an experimental piece, with its feet in a literary, rather than musical, tradition. Electrolyte explores and celebrates the bonds of friendship; No One is Coming to Save You examines isolation, and what happens to the human mind when there’s no one to talk to. Electrolyte is about mental illness, whereas No One is Coming to Save You is about mental health.

The play opens onto a relatively bare stage. There’s a boxy old TV on a chair, and a piece of AstroTurf on the floor. And there are two people lying on the AstroTurf. These are our two unnamed characters – narrators, really – played by Agatha Elwes and Rudolphe Mdlongwa.

Written by Nathan Ellis and directed by Charlotte Fraser, No One is Coming to Save You is a piece of off-beat narrative theatre that moves from funny to unsettling (and sometimes combines the two), and which takes place in the minds of two people who cannot sleep.

‘There is a woman…’ intones Elwes, as she begins to outline the minutiae of what the unnamed woman, who is sitting alone in a dark kitchen, is doing. ‘There is a man…’ says Mdlongwa, before beginning his monologue, describing the man. The piece is a duologue, rather than a dialogue (for the most part), as the two take it in turns to speak, moving around the small stage space as though the other isn’t there. Half-full glasses of water are scattered around the floor, and the television intermittently shows disjointed images of disasters and brief captions addressing the audience.

No One is Coming to Save You is far from a comfortable linear narrative. The two performers offer oddly matter-of-fact accounts of what the two characters are thinking, but, for the most part, they do not perform as the characters. Until a short dialogue towards the end of the play, the accounts are given in third person, so the man and woman are being described (in a rather objective tone) rather than embodied. Moreover, the thoughts that are being described are fragmentary, and include supposed memories that may or may not have happened. At times, the descriptive monologues become rather surreal, and at others they take on a detached, dark tone, as the two imagine ways to hurt and destroy people around them.

It is to the performers’ credit that, despite this disjointed way of constructing and presenting narrative, the audience still feels a sense of engagement with them as ‘characters’. Elwes, in particular, is compelling as she recounts the mundanity of the woman’s work as a video logger, and her relationship with Lavender, the woman she works with. However, I also very much enjoyed Mdlongwa’s somewhat absurdist explanation of what ‘selling olive oil spread to empty nesters’ entails.

Fraser’s direction is also good here. Given that the piece is delivered entirely through two not-quite-converging monologues, the movements of the two performers around one another, and the way they almost – but not quite – overlap in their speech, are very effective. The dance break (and I’m giving no spoilers on that one) is well-timed to throw the audience off-guard.

There’s a technique in creative writing that I’ve presented several times at workshops. Take a piece of prose – no matter how cute or mundane – and put it into present (or future) tense. If it’s in first person, change it to third (or second). The result is that your mundane piece of prose takes on an unsettling – often disturbing – quality. This technique is used to good effect in No One is Coming to Save You. Much of what the characters describe is really quite ordinary – even the more exaggerated fantasies of violence are so very strange to anyone who has suffered from insomnia – but the show takes that ordinariness and presents it as extraordinary. The script imbues even the act of looking at some patio doors with a profundity that hints at something more than the act itself. And the result is really rather absorbing.

No One is Coming to Save You is not about mental illness as such, but rather the low-level anxiety, angst and ennui that permeates so much of our existence – but which is relatively easy to dispel. Its hopeful – almost reassuringly twee – ending feels fitting, as this is a play about how wrong it can feel when nothing is actually wrong. As anyone who’s struggled to sleep will know, it’s always darkest just before dawn.

I’ve seen some other reviews and interviews describing this production as belonging to a particular time, or to a particular generation. I have to disagree with these assessments. While there is some sense that the ‘modern world’ is to blame for the narrators’ angst, this is not a story simply about – dare I say it – millennials. It may be tempting to imagine that this type of anxiety, dissociation and dread is a new phenomenon, this grizzled Gen-Xer found it completely recognizable. Indeed, the use of a TV, rather than a mobile phone, as the ubiquitous site of menace, adds to this effect. (I wouldn’t want to say for sure, but I bet there’s plenty of baby boomers who’d claim the phenomenon for their generation too!)

Overall, No One is Coming to Save You is an off-key, quirky piece of theatre, with good writing and direction, and two surprisingly engaging performances. If you fancy watching something a little less linear and a little more charmingly illogical, then this is a definite recommendation for you!

No One is Coming to Save You was on in London on 27th June, Bristol on 28th June, and Manchester on 30th June, as part of this year’s Incoming Festival.

Review: Electrolyte (Wildcard)

Sunday 30th June 2019
HOME, Manchester (Incoming Festival)

I was at HOME, Manchester on Sunday to see Electrolyte, one of the productions in this year’s Incoming Festival programme. I’ll be reviewing the show on North Manchester FM on Tuesday, but here’s the blog version of my review…

The Incoming Festival takes place in Manchester, Bristol and London, and showcases emerging theatre companies from the UK and beyond. Electrolyte is a production by Wildcard, which was performed in London on 28th June, Bristol on 29th June and Manchester on 30th June, as part of a UK and Ireland tour.

Electrolyte is a piece of gig theatre, written by James Meteyard and directed by Donnacadh O’Briain. Music and lyrics are by Maimuna Memon. The story unfolds through spoken word poetry and live music (in a variety of genres, though it leans towards the electronic), which is performed on stage by the multi-instrumentalist cast. This is the first time I’ve seen this sort of performance, and it is hard not to be swept up in the energy of it all.

The cast are on stage as the audience enter, apparently tuning up their instruments, joking around with each other, and greeting audience members that they recognize. Of course, on reflection, this is an important (but subtle) part of the show, so perhaps they don’t actually recognize anyone. However, this deceptive casualness sets the tone for Electrolyte’s intimate and personal narrative, which not only breaks the fourth wall at times, but also draws its audience in and encourages a degree of affection and empathy with its central character that should be at odds with its short length and unusual performance style. Music plays a pivotal role in this play, but it would be wrong to call it musical theatre.

The protagonist-narrator is Jessie, a young lass from Leeds, who is played beautifully by Olivia Sweeney. Jessie begins as a fairly recognizable character type – she’s a little bit reckless, a little bit lost, struggling to find anything of value in her life, besides getting drunk and high with her mates. The show proper kicks off when Jessie takes the mic and begins her rhymed and rhythmic narration; she introduces her friends and near enough drags the audience with her to the gig they’re attending.

Sweeney’s performance is mesmerizing throughout. She is instantly believable as the intense but vulnerable Jessie. It is easy to feel that you actually know Jessie – an impressive feat given that the play runs at just over an hour – which is vitally important to the development of the story. Jessie’s vulnerability runs much deeper than initially appears, and the fact that the audience experiences this so viscerally is, to a great extent, credit to Sweeney’s relentless, yet charming, performance.

However, credit should also be given to Meteyard’s writing. Again, the show has a deceptive casualness to it that belies the complexity of its storytelling. Reflecting back afterwards, you realize that careful signs were placed from the beginning of Jessie’s narration. Given the show’s association with the Mental Health Foundation, as well as the content warnings given beforehand, it is not really a spoiler to say that the show deals with issues of mental illness. However, I found the way in which Electrolyte presented and handled these issues to be quite unexpected and innovative. More significantly, I found the type of mental illness portrayed to be very unexpected: this is not a play about depression and anxiety. I don’t want to dwell too much on my own personal experiences, but I will say that Electrolyte deals with the type of mental illness that I have (though not the exact condition). It is rare to see the symptoms of this type of illness represented with such (at times, brutal) honesty, and I was impressed with how convincing Sweeney’s performance was. The rest of the cast move between seamlessly from performing the soundtrack (a mix of almost-numbers and ambient soundscape) to engaging in the action and dialogue with Jessie. Megan Ashley and Ben Simon are reassuringly nice as Jessie’s ‘couple friends’ Donna and Paul, and Chris Georgiou offers some comic relief as sweary extrovert Ralph. Again, the audience is encouraged to identify with the dynamics of these friendships – as it is changes in her friends’ lives (Donna and Paul are engaged, Ralph is moving away) that unsettles an already troubled Jessie.

The final two characters are the new additions to Jessie’s life. Meteyard plays the role of Jim, a London DJ who may or may not be what he seems, and Robyn Sinclair is hypnotic as Allie Touch, a singer-musician on whom Jessie becomes fixated. Sinclair’s vocal performance is excellent – again, making it very easy for the audience to empathize with Jessie’s fixation. But I also liked the fact that – no spoilers! – Sinclair voices lines for another character later in the show, a choice that subtly hints at some of the darker threads of the story.

Electrolyte has no set, save the cast’s instruments, which are laid out like a gig stage. And yet, the show is able to transport us from a flat, to the streets of Leeds, to a train, to a London warehouse with surprising ease. While the writing and performances do a lot of the work here, praise is also due to Timothy Kelly’s lighting design, which really blew me away in the show’s climactic scene, as it captured both the setting and the symbolism in an epic, almost confrontational, fashion.

If I have one criticism of Electrolyte it would be that the show’s ending is rather too neat. The play tackles some aspects of serious mental illness with a refreshing and creative rawness that is rarely seen – and yet, it doesn’t take the same approach to recovery, which is presented as rather too easy here. After being so impressed (and moved) by the play’s representation of symptoms, I felt rather let down by the breeziness of the resolution. I’m all for mental health narratives with happy endings (we’ve seen more than enough of the alternative!), but this has to be balanced with a little more candour.

Despite this, I would still definitely recommend Electrolyte. It’s an exuberant, energetic and intelligent piece of theatre, with a brilliant script and some genuinely stunning performances.

Electrolyte was on at HOME, Manchester on Sunday 30th June, as part of the Incoming Festival. It is currently touring nationally.