On the back wall of the theatre are a mass of jumbled fairy lights. Like the lives of people in shared spaces, they are messily, inseparably tangled.
Jess Murrain and Lucy Bairstow present a series of duos struggling with limited living conditions. An uptight landlady and an edgy lodger who talk at rather than to each other. Two perfectly presented lesbians whose facade cracks as they repeat the words of a scene with a different tone. A single girl, finally with a space of her own, who can’t sleep because of the urban noise.
The comedy goes some way to displaying the pressures of living with another, but the characters aren’t quite full, funny or clever enough to shatter stereotypes or produce belly laughs. By displaying straightforward stereotypes of millennials, Theatre with Legs do little to transcend those typical narratives.
The sketches don’t push hard enough at Murrain and Bairstow’s frustrations. The domestics simmer but rarely boil. Moments of song present potential for more original work, but the scenes aren’t given enough space to build. The devised scenes are neither cohesive nor absurdly scrambled enough to have an identity, resulting in a tangle much like the mass of fairy lights.
The addition of microphones, a sprinkling of glitter and nakedness demonstrate attempts at crossing into more innovative ground, but the half-hearted aesthetic experiments are more like a deposit than a solid month’s rent.
Siân Rowland’s three-hander boldly tries to unpick complex modern situations, but falls short, leaving underdeveloped characters struggling with subjects too big for them to carry.
From the tip of the pencil to the little lies told, everything in Gazing at a Distant Star is clean and white. Anonymous. Each of the characters is dealing with loss, of another and of their own identity. Arun (a gentle Harpal Hayer) blends into his cold-calling job, using the name Adam so as not to put people off by sounding too “ethnic”. Anna (an amicable Serin Ibrahim) reminisces about her sister’s potentially abusive partner. Karen (a broken Victoria Porter) sends a message to her missing son as she rides waves of guilt.
The play asks where responsibility lies, and who is to be blamed. What should they have done? Shouldn’t they have seen the signs? Couldn’t they have changed the end of these stories?
The exploration of these big questions lacks nuance. The meet-cutes are too easy, plot changes are dolloped heavily, and the twist that drives the second half of the play is easily guessed early on.
Rowland’s ideas are ambitious and her writing touches on delicate subjects worthy of discussion. The specific situation of Karen’s character—the mother of an attacker—is one unseen on most stages and increasingly relevant to our modern world, but the restricted form of the monologue Rowland provides her with limits her character to that of a victim. Combined with the other two stories, this script doesn’t carry enough weight to make an impact.
Tom Thum’s voice is a symphony orchestra. With a bass low enough to shake the seats and a falsetto high enough that glass breaking is not unimaginable, his beatboxing releases a kaleidoscopic sound. His limbs move as he beatboxes, as if the sounds are tied in with muscle memory.
Singer-songwriter Jamie MacDowell plays on the audience’s awe of Thum. “Some of the show will be me,” he says with dry wit. And MacDowell does shine too, his chilled guitar and clean vocals making the music less about showing off, and more about constructing a story.
Demonstrating their loop pedal and sampling the audience’s cheers, this talented Australian duo guide us around their mixing desk. Finding common ground in 90s R&B, their different styles – Thum is more East Coast rap while MacDowell’s rhythmic sound lends itself to campfire pop-acoustic – blend beautifully.
In this hour-long show the remarkable pair perform a mixture of original songs and classic mash-ups. Both take turns leading with personal pieces, their solos more delicate than their duets.Thum dedicates a remix of Bill Withers’ ‘Grandma’s Hands’ to his own grandma, while MacDowell performs a beautiful solo for a friend struggling with coming out, referencing the current politics of hostility back home.
The Australian duo aren’t precious over their set or their skills. “It’s totally fine if you wanna film it, just don’t do anything weird with it,” Thum laughs. The pair joke, ad lib piss-takes and stop to start over when they make mistakes. A little bit of falling, a lot of getting up.
Delicately woven together, the stories of Annie (Charlie Sellers) and Sophie (Maureen Lennon) unravel like a salty lullaby. With their melancholic monologues underscored by live folk music—played by Mortiboy who sits centre stage, watching the action unfold—Hull-based company Bellow Theatre have created a story to tell in hushed tones round a campfire.
Study, work, marriage, babies. Annie and Sophie are desperate for more than the ordinary. As they both catch a current they can’t turn back on, the play reveals the pressures and expectations on young women.
Theirs are the stories of cruel men and crap jobs. Annie, thrown into a life she’s not ready for, tries to regain control through slight acts of rebellion and slow-burning self-destruction. Sophie, trapped by a possessive husband, resorts to other people’s stories. She tells bedtime tales in order to understand her own, recounting Arabian Nights with its myths of honour, horror and possession. When she dives into her own story, Sophie makes it clear the tales of girls trapped by kings don’t only belong in fairytales.
Everything in the production is approached with care. The direction is subtle, the drama creeping through in words rather than actions. At times it begs for a harder edge. Their voices are gentle as they build up the courage to speak out, with Mortiboy’s gentle strumming dappling below their words, never quite allowing the intensity to land. This dark, delicate production reminds us there is still a chance to change the end of every story. Watching it feels like being wrapped in a warm towel after jumping into the cold sea.
The only redeeming feature of this play is the strength of Lucy Roslyn’s legs. Keeping the pose of chimpanzee Goody for an hour, Roslyn bounces and clambers around the stage, doing all she can to make the audience laugh as they consider escaping their own cage of the theatre.
Jesse Rutherford struggles more with his role of Goody’s abusive owner Frances. With slack body language and a lack of variation in his voice, his impressions are tricky to tell apart, and neither humour nor dominance flows easily from him. Frances’s authority is never realised, creating a power dynamic that has no space to play in. He is an insecure owner who turns to violence every time he can’t control Goody, but the relationship between them is not strong enough to make us care.
Where the play really suffers is the logic of its language. At first Goody communicates through sign language. Sporadically, she speaks aloud, either to Frances or to announce subtext, clumsily thrown into the script like dung at an annoying zookeeper. Frances sometimes hears and sometimes doesn’t. It sometimes matters and sometimes doesn’t. The script falters and drags. The logical thread is dropped so many times I think it must have got tangled in Goody’s cage, and no one bothers to unpick it.
As Frances and Goody half-heartedly search for comfort in the damaged love of the other, this play is essentially a weakly-told story of a lonely man gaslighting a chimpanzee.
Tattered dolls and cuddly toys are scattered around the room, inanimate until they grab the hungry attention of double act Mireille and Mathieu. Performing in a mixture of English, French and garbled nonsense, these riotous performers are just big kids.
Their attention spins from one toy to the next, inventing stories that rip the objects from their original context. Babies box; Barbie and Ken get mixed up in a futuristic, Biblical fable; and mischievous rabbits play Knock-Down-Ginger.
Aside from a misplaced phallic joke, the childish delight the pair instill ripples across the audience. The speed with which they change story, power structure and character keeps the energy high throughout.
Mireille and Mathieu don’t hide their bodies like many puppeteers. They are as flexible, malleable and prone to manipulation as the toys they control.
The pair race to catch up with each other and make us laugh even more. Mireille turns the ironing board into a horse—entirely believably—until Mathieu gets distracted by a bin lid and the horse is discarded, its former use redundant. They communicate through their puppetry rather than directly in coversation, their domestics turning into childish tiffs. The duo aren’t afraid to be brutal with each other either, thumping and rolling their way across the stage.
Top-notch tech isn’t needed to transport the audience in Arm, only a leap of imagination. At the end of this unruly performance, it seems appropriate that the toys get a round of applause too.
When the popular kid at school includes you in their joke, it can be hard to tell whether they’re laughing with you, or at you. I’m still not sure which side of the line Jamie Wood’s new show I am a Tree falls on.
Wood invites us into his life right now. He’s had a baby, and he feels stifled in London. So he decides to go on a sort of pilgrimage. He’ll escape the city, find himself in nature and breathe in country air. Cool. Chuck in a few funny clowning sequences and sweet visual metaphors, and we’re fine so far.
I am a Tree. Classic drama school wanky theatre title, right? It suggests a meta nod to the awkwardness of poncy physical theatre workshops, one of the primary reasons a lot of people feel drama degrees are a waste of money. In many ways Wood usurps the wanky theatre stereotype, precisely by embracing it. He acknowledges the cringe tropes of physical theatre and gets us laughing along as audience members are invited to be props for his journey.
Wood’s previous show, O No!, was a riff off Yoko Ono’s instructive guide. In that, he gained the audience’s trust to the point where each show resulted in a member of the audience getting naked in a bag with Wood, and talking about love. In I am a tree, there are some truly touching moments – a hug, a lift and a cradle – which all feel like leftovers from O No!. Wood manages to encompass the joy of interacting with strangers, breaking down inhibitions with rippling laughter. He embraces silliness and the ridiculous delight of play, which his other job as a hospital clown must benefit from. At one point I was lifted up and embraced, and I wouldn’t have minded staying like that all evening.
But Wood’s tactics have changed. Everyone involved in the O No! was always a volunteer. In contrast, most of I am a Tree’s participants don’t get a choice. For much of it, we are guided rather than asked if we want to take part. This is mostly fine, if you’re on the receiving end of an action in the play. But when asked to be the active participant, a lack of consent feels uneasy. Here, Wood doesn’t create the environment where it feels okay to say no.
When I was brought up onstage and made to do something I didn’t want to do, I was (justifiably) resistant. This came across in my body language. When I looked apprehensive, he looked at me and said, “It’s not about you.” I had been laughing along for most of the show, but here I felt humiliated.
I’m normally a fan of audience participation. Most of the time I’m happy to go along with whatever the performer wants, if I feel it serves a purpose. When Tim Crouch asked me to pull away his chair as he stood by a noose in a performance of Malvolio, I didn’t want to do it, but I knew that it was important for the story. I knew that I was meant to feel uncomfortable. I knew that aided the story.
In I am a Tree, my lack of comfort was not an asset, but an accidental humiliation. My role could have been played by anyone else, and would have benefited hugely from someone who actually wanted to take part in that moment. I clearly wasn’t having fun, and that served no purpose to the story. In fact, it probably ruined the depth he was aiming for in that segment. Well sorry Jamie, it should have been a volunteer.
The audience at this preview were a very theatre-y audience, and I’m sure the case will be much the same when the show goes to the Edinburgh Fringe. But if I were to take any of my friends who don’t go to the theatre often, and they were asked to get up on that stage, most of them would run a fucking mile. Audience participation should either be funny, heartening, or purposeful. This was none of the above.
As he continues on his pilgrimage, Wood’s journey becomes more spiritual, and I start to lose understanding of how seriously he’s taking this. I don’t feel the deep questions resonate with the silliness, and I can’t help but think how GCSE so many of the actions are. By the end of it, I can’t be bothered to figure out if he’s being meta about it all.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been expecting a clever piece ripping apart the stereotypes of luvvies, just because of the title of the piece and the initial nods towards that path. Maybe he really was just playing up on his surname and really did just want to engage with the idea of family (family tree/ tree/ Wood) and nature. Maybe the fire-dance-scene I was involved with was genuinely a way to figure out a deep-rooted question in someone’s life. Maybe the show is actually designed to help people understand what they truly want, and who they truly are.
Maybe. But regardless of what it was meant to be, when it started I felt hopeful, humoured and lifted, both literally and emotionally. When it ended I felt humiliated, and that uncomfortable feeling that I still wasn’t in on the joke.
This was originally a review of Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic, which was performed at In Between Time Festival in Bristol. The show consists of the same scene repeated, with slight alterations, over and over. And over. And over.
The review was (politely) rejected from publication.
This is how everyone should be introduced to every new city. You should get off a train, close your eyes and when you open them there should be a stranger standing before you with their hand outstretched. They should look kind and a little bit odd. They should say, ‘please can I hold your hand?’, and they should lead you round their city. You should get all of their warmth and their knowledge and you should know that they are protecting you and that they are showing you the ropes and it should feel like nothing in the world could hurt you.
Rosana Cade’s Walking:Holding is a trust exercise, a therapy session, a social experiment and a play. It is really something quite intimate and quite beautiful. (And it’s free).
As I walk along the streets of Stoke-on-Trent, holding hands with various strangers, self-consciousness gradually fades. At first I think how people might see us- what relationship they put on us- but after a while I stop caring. I notice everyone else who is holding hands. I want them to notice us too.
We went on stranger danger days at school. I wonder what my teachers would say as I walk around a new city with people I’ve never met before. I’m pretty sure this isn’t following their instructions. These people aren’t actors, just locals who were willing to do something a little strange, to put their trust in a project and to reach out to strangers. We look at ourselves in shop windows and mirrors. We look at graffiti and signs as if they were written for us. We talk about lunch and life and Stoke and London and theatre and my future and their past and their future and holding hands and intimacy and love and loss and it just feels so open and warm even though it’s beginning to lash with cold rain. We joke and talk deeply and move subject swiftly as I’m handed from one stranger to the next. This is a movie, scored by the street performers and surrounding chatter.
The strangers I walk with are at once entirely individual and a representation of everyone. They are a mixture of ages, genders, disabilities, races, heights and chattiness-es. They all wanted to hold my hand. Some hands are cold and some are warm and some are so soft and some are courser with a firmer grip.
(We go from having our hand held as a child to holding the hand of the person you love to holding an elderly hand with the roles reversed. When was the last time you held someone’s hand, properly?)
An old man leads me through a pub and out into the sunlight on the other side where a marching band passes. We talk about love. He says when his previous wife died it was like when you’re holding hands and let go, and then something stops you from being able to hold hands again. But then he met someone else, who I also have the privilege of walking with. And he learnt how to hold hands again.
Walking:Holding makes you understand the power of a team. The solidity of someone standing by your side as your own little army makes you stand a little taller. It makes you want to cry. It makes you feel so valued.
My hands feel so soft and warm and strong. My cheeks ache from smiling.
Please can I hold your hand?
[Experienced 27/08/16. I went to Stoke-on-Trent for it specially, and it was worth every second of the journey.]
[Edited 12/10/16. It’s still messy and not right but I realised I was just wrong on my first reading and completely missed so much of it, so trying to fix it now.]
This is the song my family listen to every Christmas Day morning. The best bit is when Clarence says ‘you better be good for goodness sake’ so low it almost doesn’t sound real.
The first time I saw Springsteen live was in Cardiff maybe 10 years ago. My dad took us all for my mum’s birthday present (though he likes him more than she does). The only song I knew was Born in the USA and he didn’t sing it. The second time was in 2012 in Hyde Park where he sang with Paul McCartney and then had the power cut off after performing for more than three hours. I knew all of his Wrecking Ball album that time. A few months ago we saw him again at Wembley. This time I could (nearly) sing along to them all.
This is the ultimate Springsteen concert experience.
When Bruce Springsteen brings you up on stage the crowd goes wild. In part this is because one woman- it’s usually a woman, when he brings groups up he’ll bring up men too, but he always pulls a woman up because he dances with them as if it were his lover, staring intently and singing to her, and his image is very much heterosexual- gives you the feeling that maybe one day that could be you, you’ll be the one to be pulled away from the crowd and held by a super-hero, rock god alpha male. Fair, in part it’s also because Springsteen is just really cool and it’s amazing to be up on stage with him, and being up there makes you feel like a bit of a rock god. But still, the heterosexual-alpha-male thing too.
This is Springsteen being a lad and drinking the crowds’ beer.
This is Ira Brand in her play dressed as her character Ollie dressed as his idol Springsteen.
‘Poor man want to be rich Rich man want to be king And a king ain’t satisfied ‘Til he rules everything’ -Badlands
‘Bruce Springsteen in 1984 is the epitome of the masculine man, with his rippling muscles, gristly voice and words of love and power. He’s the type of man who would be comfortable sitting with a beer without looking at his phone.
Ira Brand performs in drag as Ollie, the graphic designer who wants to be The Boss. In an exploration of power, sexuality and desire, she confronts important questions about gender today.
Rocking between stories of sex with strange men, uncertain questioning and lip-synced Springsteen, Brand defies the traditional tropes of the drag king scene in becoming androgynous. Her breasts, chest hair drawn on, are on show as she smashes an air guitar – the costume may be masculine but her female body is swinging free. Brand’s gender in Break Yourself is a blank slate, heavy with layers of performance.
She shines as a storyteller, her clear, crisp voice honest and no-nonsense as she gently deconstructs the subtleties of gender, switching between herself and her character. Her attraction to strong men and sex that’s on the “right side of violence” links to her disdain for apologetic traits in female language. Tapping into the desire to have the qualities of those we admire or fear makes Brand’s piece universal.
Though Break Yourself suffers from a lack of cohesiveness in terms of its structure and story, individually each part shouts about an inherent sense of worthlessness disguised by performance, be it through mannerisms or clothes.
Break Yourself asks more questions than it answers, forcing us to consider the way we perform gender and identity, and how we judge others. Perhaps we’re all just dancing in the dark.’
But then you listen back to the lyrics of ‘Fire’, and you realise that Ira Brand’s play is trying to shout about all of this, buried under layers of oozing alpha male sex appeal and Springsteen’s sick tunes.
I’m pulling you close You just say no You say you don’t like it But girl I know you’re a liar ‘Cause when we kiss Ooooh, Fire
‘You just say no.’ You don’t mean it. You want to kiss me.
That’s not really okay, Bruce.
I say I wanna stay You say you wanna be alone
Burnin in my soul It’s outta control
He’s wrong. To say it’s out of control would suggest that men doesn’t have control over his sexual desire, which would be an offensive suggestion to men. Sexual assault is not an inability to make a move, it’s a decision to make a move. It’s a choice. It’s not ‘outta control’ of the perpetrator at all.
There was so much furor over Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines in 2013. Perhaps if the video of Fire illustrated the lyrics, it wouldn’t be so celebrated.
I know you want it I know you want it I know you want it.
I’ve idolised Springsteen for years, and still adore his music. I’m still going to listen to that version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town every Christmas morning. But it makes me uncomfortable to listen to him sing those lyrics about getting with a woman who clearly doesn’t reciprocate the ‘burnin’ desire.
Kate Wyver 