Lammas: Day 1

It's time for Lammas, the fifth event in our Year of Celebrating the Seasons, and I've been reliably informed this one is all about bread and markets. As is now our wont, we've got a week of festive things planned for the season.

Lammas Earrings

I think my collection of Lammas-inspired earrings is my favourite set yet. Today... crumpets!

Tea and Toast Tea

I do like a seasonal tea (as you might have spotted this year). It was a bit difficult finding bread-favoured teas for our Lammas week, but this seemed close enough... Tea and Toast by Bird & Blend Tea Company. It tastes like raspberry jam!

‘First Fruits’

And I started off our Lammas week seriously with a chapter from Ronald Hutton's The Stations of the Sun: 'First Fruits'.

Lammas Candle

We lit our Lammas/Lughnasadh from Chalice Creations tonight for the first time. It's lavender, patchouli and lemon. (Ironically I lit it shortly after reading Ronald Hutton on why Lughnasadh and Lammas probably aren't interchangeable.)

Review: Totally Trucked (Katie Damer, GM Fringe)

Wednesday 20 July 2022
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.

Review: We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret (Blue Balloon Theatre, GM Fringe)

Tuesday 19 July 2022
International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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 Tuesday 19th July, I was at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to review We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret by Blue Balloon Theatre. The radio version of this review will be going out on The Festival Show on Friday 22nd July, but here’s the blog version…

So, I started this year’s Fringe by seeing Pill by Rebecca Phythian, one half of Blue Balloon Theatre. The other co-founder of Blue Balloon is Jas Nisic, and We Need to Talk is her piece at this year’s festival – so it seemed right (especially after enjoying Pill) to go and see it and complete the pair!

We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret is a very different type of show to Pill, which was a solo monologue with autobiographical experience. We Need to Talk is a musical performance – as it says in the title, it’s a ‘jazz cabaret’.

Specifically, Nisic tells the story of a break-up through jazz, lounge and torch songs, interspersed with storytelling narration. It’s an ambitious performance – and I should add that I saw the show on the hottest day in Britain since records began, which made it a very ambitious performance. The show last two hours, with two short intervals and two costume changes, and for most of that time Nisic is singing. I have to take my hat off to her for getting through this on Tuesday night (though I also have to take my hat off to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for managing to maintain a perfectly pleasant temperature inside the venue for the audience!).

Nisic – accompanied by Dave Cavendish on piano – performs a repertoire of classic songs of the twentieth century that move through the various emotions of a relationship and relationship breakdown. I imagine all the songs will be reasonably familiar to audiences, and it’s easy to imagine the emotional trajectory of the selected numbers (in fact, I’m willing to bet you can already guess a couple of the songs that were included even if you didn’t see the show). This is significant for reasons I’ll come back to shortly.

First thing’s first… Nisic can really sing. I’ve heard her perform a couple of her own compositions before, which were in a more contemporary style. But now that I’ve seen We Need to Talk, it’s clear to me that she has a voice that’s perfectly suited to the rich contralto resonances of jazz, and with the power to really supply the force needed for some of the more emotional elements. Nisic’s singing alone was enough to make We Need to Talk an enjoyable show – but that’s not the only selling point here.

Nisic’s performance was charmingly idiosyncratic. Or idiosyncratically charming. I’m not sure which is the best way to describe it.

As We Need to Talk begins, she bounds up to the microphone in a short, sort of 60s-style dress, chunky black boots with love hearts on them, and flicked black eyeliner. As the first number begins, she shouts a greeting to the audience (with the obligatory repeated requests for a more enthusiastic response) before gleefully announcing, ‘Isn’t being in love sick?’ in an unmistakably Manc accent.

Nisic’s narration of the relationship and its breakdown continues in this style. Littered with colloquialisms, plenty of swearing, a few references to bodily functions (including a bit of a gross description of the aftereffects of a £9.99 deal at a Chinese buffet) and pop culture touchstones that include Game of Thrones, Friends and the Build-a-Bear workshop. It’s funny, in-your-face and very relatable – Nisic keeps the details of the relationship just on the right side of vague (including the gender of the former partner), allowing the audience ample opportunity to superimpose their own experiences onto the narrative.

And this is important, as there’s a feeling of universality to We Need to Talk. As the title reveals, the show isn’t concerned with narrating a unique individual story, but rather at gesturing to something more universal. I don’t know anyone who has ever actually used the words ‘We need to talk’ to signal the end of a relationship, but the words are such a recognizable shorthand that we all know what they mean. Similarly, the trajectory of the break-up story being told is also recognizable – the desperation, the bottles of wine, the tubs of ice cream, the cringeworthy messages, the new flame, the rebound date, the attempt at reconciliation, are threaded together in a way that we can understand and, even if we haven’t done those exact things ourselves, relate to.

Which brings us on to the songs… It might seem like an odd choice to combine a sweary, shouty, down-to-earth story about a definitively twenty-first-century break-up with old jazz standards by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Julie London, but it really does work here.

On the one hand, there’s a real charm to the way Nisic (or her on-stage persona, at least) narrates her own heartbreak and humiliation through the somewhat elevated medium of classic jazz and blues standards. In the grand scheme of break-ups, the one being described is pretty mundane, but the musical accompaniment gives a light-hearted grandiosity that lifts it out of its ordinariness.

But on the other hand, We Need to Talk really emphasizes the power of the songs being performed. How amazing is it that, in 2022, ‘Cry Me a River’ (the Julie London song, not the Justin Timberlake one) is still a go-to break-up song? That people can still listen to it and think, ‘This song is totally about me’? Some of the songs that Nisic performs are even older – ‘All of Me’ is over 90 years old, and ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ is nearly 100 years old. For these songs to still be able to form the soundtrack to the end of a relationship is pretty impressive. Nisic’s powerful performance of the numbers really underlines their continued cultural and emotional resonance.

I’ve commented on Nisic’s vocal abilities, but this was only part of the musical performance. We Need to Talk isn’t simply a narration punctuated by musical numbers. Instead, Nisic makes the songs part of the narration, incorporating them fully into her story. Although clearly well able to perform the songs ‘straight’, Nisic often interposes her own style to underline the significance or relevance of the song she’s singing (or for comedy effect, of course) – she slips into a more Mancunian delivery of lines in places, or emphasizes certain words and lines to make a point. Highlights for me were a particularly frenetic performance of ‘All of Me’ in a desperate attempt to ‘bribe’ the soon-to-be ex-partner to stay, followed by the sad resignation of a quieter, more vulnerable performance of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. I also enjoyed the comedic performance of ‘Fever’ to narrate a drunken rebound date, which gets more lascivious and slurred as the song goes on. And as I’ve already noted, ‘Cry Me a River’ makes an appearance when the ex reappears seeking reconciliation. The almost confrontational style in which this one is performed is very good fun to watch.

We Need to Talk is a truly joyful show with a lot of charm. Nisic’s stage persona is endearing and relatable, and her vocal performances are impressive and assured. Ultimately, the experience of watching We Need to Talk is a bit like watching a friend go through a break-up, but a friend who’s really good at singing jazz.

One of the things I enjoy about the Fringe Festival is the rollercoaster of emotions you go on as you work your way through the programme. Each performance can elicit such different emotional responses. With We Need to Talk, the overriding emotion is happiness – at the end of the day, this is a show that will make you smile. And if you’ve endured a gruelling day of unprecedented temperatures, stuffy workplaces and fraying tempers, what more could you possibly want?

We Need to Talk, a Jazz Cabaret was on at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 19th and 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.