Author Archives: Beccy Smith

About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.

Jammy Voo: Birdhouse

The worlds created by Jammy Voo’s all-female clown troupe are always idiosyncratic, intimate and weird. Their combination of vignette, puppetry, physical theatre and clown proposes unsettling worlds where bodies, objects and voices seem animated by external forces – anxiety, social pressure, and of course us, the audience. In Hitchcock’s The Birds, they’ve found a great vehicle for this unique style: multiplying tension and suspense and the unnerving transformation of the normal into something very strange indeed.

Locked in the closed-down Coronet cinema, four middle-aged women, alongside an enigmatic popcorn seller-cum-musician have taken shelter from the bird attacks outside. Sequences of song, visual theatre that plays with scale, shadow and costume gradually illuminate their experiences amongst the gradually encroaching birds outside, gleefully expanding on identifiable images and themes – from a literal deconstruction of ‘bird’s nest’ hair to some rather odd appearances of eggs. Some of the sections feel more digested than others. A gameshow where the questions explore sinister collective nouns for birds (a murder of crows, anyone?) still feels like a stage in the devising and occasionally the songs (which are brilliantly performed) seem to come from nowhere.

But there are broader undertones rippling beneath the surface of these scenes too. Locked in their cinema prison there’s a comment here about hysteria – this birdhouse could equally be a madhouse which itself holds onto the women’s silly pettiness as they are subdued and seduced by their aggressive, escaping bird puppets. A mishmash of audio news reports draws out the theme of nature rendered unnatural by weird weather phenomena that are all man-made.

Adapting Hitchcock of course sets the style bar high, but the company respond in kind. A colour changing cyclorama sets a defiantly 60s tone and is put to vibrant effect both as a dynamic backdrop and shadow screen. Yngvild Aspeli’s feathered puppets are superbly made, with a distinct flavour of the taxidermist’s studio and brimming with character. Aesthetically exciting, full of strange and unnerving theatrical images, Birdhouse succeeds as both a homage and as a highly original, thought-provoking and enjoyable piece in its own right.

Fine Chisel: Dumbstruck

A lonely whale researcher, the birth of a pirate radio station, the science of sonar (as demonstrated using a pair of ukeleles), and the real life story of the 52hz whale are woven together in Dumbstruck, an ambitious and rather uneven tale by the band-cum-theatre troupe Fine Chisel. The company ricochet us around from lecture halls to isolated islands and the wide blue sea, but the storytelling is rather too fragmented to gain real momentum.

The storytelling is as dispersed as a distant pod of whales at sea: story intercuts song interrupts story offering us a series of snapshots of feeling and incident but with little sense of their build. So the play is rather like a curate’s egg – full of ideas and curiosity, and also of many forms, including a nifty bit of puppetry with ukeleles of various scales and some more abstract movement sequences. But, without the engine of a story at its heart (the revelation of what’s at stake for our scientists comes, to my mind, too late to drive the story on and there’s a narrative misstep in emphasising so much of the mystery of the whale) the formal flourishes can’t take us anywhere new.

There’s some interesting characterisation in here and the ensemble work fluidly and fluently. The set hides some good surprises and is nicely released. The pirate radio sub-plot’s entertaining, though you can’t help feeling that it’s in there only to serve the company-as-band idea (see early Little Bulb work for a more successful integration of this trope). But ultimately, even with the goodwill the company earns, the show drags and is missing a definitive hook at its heart.

John Osborne: On the Beach

70s archive footage of muscly young men in too-tight shirts, Tommy Cooper wobbling across an ice rink and Eric Morecambe clowning around with dodgems in the background play out in the orangey/turquoisey tones of the decade on a centre-stage screen as we enter the space. The Libertines swell through the speakers – it’s an old song I love and the anachronistic montage effectively triggers the nostalgia it seems set to evoke. Most of us have had budget beach holidays in the less loved corners of the English coast, and a show that seems made to celebrate these places appeals to the dog-eared memories of our childhood.

This nostalgic flavour is definitely one performer John Osborne is reaching for, but sadly, after those first few moments, it never really materialises. It’s also never clear why we start in the 70s, before shifting to the story of one escapist lunch break in 2012, via touching on some childhood memories of the early 90s. Perhaps a sense that the glamour of the seaside comes from those halcyon 70s summers? Flashes of the storytelling – a family cricket game, an old couple sharing a punnet of strawberries – evoke a certain timelessness. At other times we’re simply not clear where, or when in the memories we are. This isn’t helped by Osborne’s somewhat relentless delivery, which hits the rhythm of performance poetry, with its emphatic end lines, but without real colour, making it feel leaden and, yes, rather boring.

The show is not quite one thing or another. The writing, though clearly heartfelt and peppered with some flashes of striking imagery, lacks the muscle and dynamics of good performance poetry. The staging – one man on a stool next to an inadequately lit screen – is too flat for theatre. And I felt simply frustrated that it wasn’t done better. A little direction could have added some light and shade to Osborne’s delivery. The video footage, used to add flavour at certain interludes, needed at the very least to maintain the illusion of having been created for the show and not extracted by an online Google search. When Osborne tell us, with new seriousness, ‘I realised then that I had given up on life’, it feels like a platitude, not a confession – he hasn’t earned that seriousness.

This is a sweet and sincere show, but one that simply needs more – more time, more commitment, and a bit more thought about what it wants to do. Its publicity had earned an audience ready for a poetic trip down the sandy avenues of memory lane, but what was on offer was more of a sandy sandwich whose different parts were disintegrating in the heat.

Delirium: From Where I’m Standing

From Where I’m Standing is a slick physical theatre production from youthful company Delirium. There’s a distinct Complicite aesthetic to the show, which has been both devised by the company and scripted (by writers Sarah Henley and Kate Robson-Stuart), producing a dynamic dramaturgy that effectively integrates design elements and ensemble storytelling. Focusing on the Mumbai bombings threatened earlier in 2013 and fictionalised here as having taken place, the action unfolds across three time periods and three generations to examine the causes and effects of this inciting incident form the point of view of a Person of Interest injured in the explosion.

There are strong performances all round from a versatile cast who convincingly portray an array of characters from sixth-formers graduating in the heady run up to Labour’s 1997 election victory, to PR media spivs and gurus in 2028. The show demonstrates ambition in its scope, and although some of the themes – (mis)communication, and the ways we use storytelling to create a sense of self – are a little over-enunciated in the script, the emotional stories portrayed feel truthful and touching and the writing generally steers clear of the sort of moral generalisation which comes easily in theatrical explorations of terrorism (although a bullying scene with US agents teeters close to she edge).

The physicality is thoughtfully done and well integrated with the text to produce moments of intriguing underscoring that never detract from our sense of the believable reality of the characters and world, though sometimes the clever use of iPads felt a bit intrusive. The direction also makes good use of David M Saunders’ powerful score which only occasionally felt a little overbearing in its cinematic scale. This is a confident production from an emerging company telling a contemporary story with commitment and dynamism.

Perth Theatre Company: It’s Dark Outside

Perth Theatre Company and Weeping Spoon productions (Tim Watts, Arielle Gray and Chris Isaacs) burst onto the British theatre scene in 2011 on the tiny back of touchingly powerful animation/puppetry one-man dystopia story Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer, which deservedly went on to tour globally. Their follow-up show, It’s Dark Outside, comes freighted with expectation and it’s great to see the company taking their form in a new direction, whilst holding on to some of those qualities – emotional directness, quality puppetry and expressive visual metaphor – that made their first production so original and powerful.

In many ways, this is a much more puppetry oriented show: its dance of objects and characters enacts the fragmentation and confusion of a mind deteriorating with age. The story focuses on one old man, discovered fidgeting heavily in his living room, which isn’t behaving entirely as it should. A distant Western movie plays in the background as fluffy clouds of memory escape his head. This forms a wonderfully effective puppetry metaphor and, from something of a slow start, we are soon catapulted into an affecting quest story as, armed with a butterfly net, a tent and a ‘Wanted’ poster, he tries to snare them back.

The video design allows us to move effortlessly between the real and fantastical, and imagery and association powerfully build as the story grows. Accompanied by his trusty steed (in a wonderful absurd bit of puppetry I don’t want to ‘spoil’ too much here), our hero hunts through the fleeting memories and experiences of his life which themselves prove to be as insubstantial as little fluffy clouds. Puppets of different scales and forms animate the various versions of himself and his family and are always expertly and compellingly handled: absurd imagery and an affecting score amplify the resonance of the quest.