Author Archives: Beccy Smith

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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.

Blind Summit: The Heads

Blind Summit: The Heads

Blind Summit: The Heads

In devised work, it’s the frame that often carries the weight of really communicating a show. In work that’s experimental in form and that draws the audience into its fictions in unconventional ways, it’s the frame that creates and clarifies meaning. Blind Summit’s new production, The Heads – developed from one section of their previous three-act national and international touring hit The Table – takes this process to its material conclusion. The staging is simply three pendant frames – three cardboard picture frames to be precise, and it’s these which propose and bring nuance to the meaning of the moving images within them.

As the title suggests, much of this content is a choreography of heads. Not human heads of course, as Blind Summit are one of the small number of puppetry RFOs whose work sets out to advance this increasingly popular artform, but rather the evocatively realistic and detailed head figures for which puppeteer and designer Nick Barnes is known. Three and then more identical heads materialise in the similar but different cardboard cut-out frames. Their choreography is slow, almost ceremonial and accompanied by a mesmeric minimalist score. They hover in the zone between character (looking, appearing to respond to one another, to us) and object, agitating at the edges of where object becomes puppet, movement becomes animation. The heads are all identical, yet our unremitting focus on their movement reveals the moments when they assume characterful qualities and those where they return back to a merely aesthetic presence. Some of the material emphasises this, fluidly assembling and then deconstructing configurations of hands and heads to continually adjust our sense of just what it is we are looking at. In doing so, The Heads feels like it offers a new perspective on puppetry, constantly holding us in the magical moment of transformation that is at the heart of this artform.

This quality in the work is intriguing, as is the palpable skill involved in the increasingly precise, frenetic choreography of heads executed by its four puppeteers through and across the frames in response to the complexifying score. But the show feels like its reaching for more, or, at least, this intriguing quality doesn’t entirely satisfy in itself.

The opening images are of geometry and light: we watch lines and circles move, create shapes and disappear. The show frames the puppetry within an abstraction, inviting us to relate the heads and their worlds to the purity of shape, of light. Intellectually and formally it’s fascinating and rather hypnotically beautiful, but there is too a sense of emptiness here. Though the work references Butoh, its formal emphasis seems to lack the connection to life, the transmission of energy, really needed to harness the power of this type of dance. This is a show of surface veneer and occasionally even padding. As an audience steeped in visual languages we are quick to complete the gradually crystallising images and the rhythm and development often feels mystifying, even alienating. What is the journey we are being asked to go on? Sometimes it simply feels like we need more content: the brief presentation of stylised characters for example feels underdeveloped, as does the work with text.

Only in the closing sections does the piece start to gesture toward something more human and enticing. Suddenly, we encounter a sense of depth rather than simply cleverness and skill and it left me wanting more. More narrative or perhaps just more of a sense that something is being communicated here. For now, these remain empty heads and something more is needed to elevate the work beyond the demonstration of an idea and to apply its bountiful aesthetic pleasures to the audience and our world.

www.blindsummit.com

Root Experience: What Is It About That Night

Root Experience: What Is It About That Night

Root Experience: What Is It About That Night

Whilst the stage of Brighton’s oldest theatre – the Georgian chocolate-box Theatre Royal – is dark, audiences are still being admitted via the 200 year-old stage door. A series of opportunities to explore backstage, of which What Is It About That Night is the fullest production, have been curated to entice the public into the building’s usually unseen spaces in its Winter Out of Hours programme.

It’s an intriguing premise, and gathering outside the theatre’s tiny stage door on a near-deserted side street on Brighton’s North Lanes feels rather glamorously illicit. The rich history of the Theatre Royal, a warren of intriguing corners and host to two centuries of theatre stars from Charles Kemble to Noel Coward, offers an incredible starting point for site-specific devising. And so one can’t help feeling the weight of missed opportunities in this slight production from local research-focused theatre company Root Experience.

There is something out of focus in the frame, which establishes that the show was created in response to Ireton’s time on the stage door in Edinburgh but which elides this into a narrative placing her amongst the history of the Theatre Royal. I’m all for total creative license when it comes to creating stories, but all making this explicit did was undermine my trust in our narrator, distracting me from the historical anecdotes I’m sure we were intended to take as read.

Ireton’s presence is utterly charming, and the chance to basically participate in such an intimate gig felt very privileged, but I wished for greater variety in the material presented and the musical style. A tantalising hint of what Ireton could do if she really let rip was there in her Deitrich cover, but it was back under wraps all too soon. More seriously, the link between the songs’ content and the framing conversation attempting to link them to the spaces felt as unclear as the solo performer’s relationship to the material itself. For a research-based company it seemed a shame that the writing focused on only the most famous stories about the theatre’s history and the use of the space felt rather pedestrian. The gig set-up of the final section in the auditorium was far less interesting than what had preceded it, and so made for an odd finale, and to miss the trick of showing us the auditorium from the stage (I heard several audience members wondering ‘Is this the stage?’ as we crossed it) felt like a criminally wasted opportunity.

There were some sweet moments in this production: the glimpse of feet in the front row as we sat under the stage; the revelation of an actors-only bar hatch backstage granting us a snifter of whiskey before stepping out onto the boards. And there is certainly talent here in the shape of Ireton’s gentle presence and her hidden supporting musicians, but this understated performance left me feeling disappointed. So much more could have been done to animate this atmospheric space and its hidden histories.

www.rootexperience.co.uk

Shunt: The Architects ¦ Photo: Susanne Dietz

Shunt: The Architects

Shunt: The Architects ¦ Photo: Susanne Dietz

Shunt are innovators whose ambitious work has long worried at the definitions of audience, venue and performance, creating perfectly perplexing theatre experiences whose power to unsettle and surprise through sheer theatricality have far outstripped the company’s many aesthetic imitators. The long running and late-lamented enterprise of Shunt Vaults (lost to the murky foundations of the Shard) created a diverse ecosystem for a whole family of new performance as well as rich site-specific possibilities in its glorious rat-infested corners.

The creation of a labyrinth in the company’s new production The Architects seems a fitting tribute to this lost space. This is not the only way in which The Architects feels like it expresses many of the company’s core obsessions: the pleasures and intrigues of a contained environment, establishing for the audience an identity and sense of security that the company revel in undermining. A cast of perfectly observed grotesques barely keeping some destructive half-glimpsed force at bay…

Shunt approach the Minotaur myth from an oblique angle – we are in the present day and we’re embarking on a decadent cruise – and it says a lot about the resonance of the source material and their sense of its heart that it is nevertheless profoundly identifiable. Their emphasis is the intrigue of the tale’s dark sexuality, from which they have created a company of grotesques to relish. Always reassuringly separated from us by one type of screen or another, the threat that they exude grows ominously, culminating in a genuinely unnerving closing sequence (and a breathtaking aerial turn I‘ve never seen done elsewhere).

The architects themselves, in charge of the boat, are brilliant comic characters: all Scandinavian earnestness and inappropriate upward inflections. A live band animates the performance, giving depth to the world of the cruise, though I wished the bar had stayed open during the show so we could really be given the chance to live in the fiction of the space. The company have fun exploring episodic storytelling that makes judicious use of black outs to give scale to their material: by the time the boat scenario breaks down, we genuinely feel we may have been months at sea. And there is great scope here to demonstrate their gift for working an audience, for bringing us together and unpicking our expectations.

This is in many ways a show of binaries: cool Scandinavian order vs. lurking bestiality; the on-land masterminds and the architects on deck; the orderly(ish) frame of the ship ultimately undermined by the far less manageable reality within. For me, The Architects works as a really evocative container for the company’s unique vision. It’s the architecture of this myth that really takes this production to another level: the shared references it supports allow us to appreciate with much greater clarity the company’s craft in translating an ancient myth into a piece of work packed with questions of resonance – about hedonism, about society and about art. One note of caution – this is site-specific performance in a genuinely untamed site and it’s the middle of winter, so be sensible and wear a big coat!

www.shunt.co.uk

Weeping Spoon: The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

Weeping Spoon: The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

Weeping Spoon: The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer

The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik is an elegant and touching piece of solo theatrical storytelling that effortlessly fuses digital projection, puppetry and live music to draw you into a very idiosyncratic visual world. The focus on stage is a large round screen, reminiscent of the round window of a space ship, or a bubble, and beautifully echoed by the large polystyrene ball helmet that Alvin dons when he decides to take on the role of underwater explorer. We step into a world within worlds.

Alvin (Tim Watts) is grieving for the loss of his wife; the brief story of their relationship is related in a very filmic animation (all panning cameras and shifting close-ups) that scrolls across the round screen. The oceans have risen and humanity is in the last desperate throes of a panicked bid for survival masterminded by a Biggles-type (cue comically wiggling stick-on moustache) whose hair-brained schemes have sent plenty of those remaining to a watery (or fiery or explosive) death. Alvin, following the glowing soul of his lost love takes up the quest, diving into this new water-world in an attempt to find a hidden crater that will miraculously restore a habitable human world.

There are moments when it feels the cuteness is in danger of overpowering the material, but Watt’s vision of the rest of humanity is determinedly bleak – greedy, fearful, thoughtless. In the underwater world Sputnik finds more constant companions: a tiny glowing creature who feels like a friend and who he eventually shoos off to a family, a funky disco ball (that prompts some obligatory puppet disco dancing), and a curious whale briefly animated by his wife’s spirit. The puppetry is simple and beautifully executed – a gloved hand and a lit polystyrene ‘helmet’ charmingly step, climb and swim across the disc. The aesthetic feels entirely original and homemade – Watts has made the animation and does some live drawing onto the disc from his mac, plays the ukulele, and has picked out the pop score that keeps us vitally in a contemporary, and not a fairytale, world.

The show was initially produced for the Blue Room Theatre in Perth and its slick rhythm and detailed production choices reflect an extensive touring history since then, the piece travelling around Australia, the US and now the UK, picking up awards en route. No word is extraneous, no gesture out of place.

www.weepingspoon.com

Forced Entertainment: The Coming Storm ¦ Photo: Hugo Glendinning

Forced Entertainment: The Coming Storm

Forced Entertainment: The Coming Storm ¦ Photo: Hugo Glendinning

What is it that makes a good story? This is the deceptively simple question Forced Entertainment coyly pose in the opening moments of new productionThe Coming Storm. And it’s a big one! Their responses are multiple, thoughtful and partisan, as you might expect from a company whose body of work has steadily dismantled many of the givens of the contemporary dramatic form. Contrastive options gain momentum and lists build into an extended opening monologue that’s both sublime and casual, ridiculous and profound.

As it settles into its rhythm, the performance opens into a series of broken narratives offered by the six-strong cast, from the random, daft, seemingly inconsequential, to the personal and evocative and occasionally gripping. Each is complemented by a rough staging by the ensemble with their ready instinct for staging and game play and the piece riffs on diverse theatricalities, from the pantomime to the post-dramatic, retaining a scratchy improvised tone throughout. My reliance on lists in this review reflects the piece’s wilful multifariousness. Any answer can only ever be partial, personal. Theatre, like life, is provisional: not meaningless but rather overloaded with too many potential, perhaps pointless meanings. As ever, their work is asking us to consider the conditions of theatre-making, deconstructing all of the choices of meaning and staging that go into making a piece of work.

What the stories share in common is their identification with individuals in the cast – this is Cathy’s story; this one is something that Robin wants to tell. And these are individuals we want to spend time with – their presences are funny, self deprecating, empathetic. Their interactions with one another and with us feel, largely, genuine and unforced; the contrast between what they’re doing (creating fictions) and how they’re doing it, at times, extreme.

So it’s clever, provocative, sure. Peppered too with easy comedy and pleasant to spend time inside. But it feels straightforward to identify what they are doing, what hypothesis they are testing. I feel I have encountered this question before in their work (most clearly in 2004’s Bloody Mess) and so the experience of the show for me was not so much of treading new ground but rather of revisiting a familiar intellectual landscape, one littered with powerful memories of past incursions to which this exploration couldn’t live up.

It’s long too, even those lovely opening monologues, exploring stories’ key qualities, run on for a length that feels like it goes beyond any point about variousness, even beyond any point about the fruitlessness of the attempt. It feels like there is more yet to be discovered about the rhythm of the show as a whole and about exactly what makes the question they are posing here different to previous questions. Or if it is the same, how the answer might have moved on.

And what is the storm that is coming? Is it the threat of a narrative that might overcome the troupe’s careful accumulations of offers and propositions? Or an access of real feeling that might break through the theatrical constructions? I longed for some sense of anxiety or overwhelm that could push us beyond the controlled feeling of the formal exploration.

I find it a privilege to watch such experienced theatre-makers doing their thing, and I found the work most exciting when it seemed to acknowledge the company’s experiences, or at least the fact that they had experienced some of life, a rare quality in a sector dominated by those young enough to feel they can afford to work in it. Is it naive to want more of the ‘mess’ of life and less of the control of an experiment in work such as this? I hope not, because it’s the urgency of questions about our lives that, to my mind, makes art compelling.

www.forcedentertainment.com