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.

Bryony Kimmings: Mega

By the end of Mega, I am dancing in the rain with a stranger to the persuasive beat of MC Hammer that no one apart from us can hear. Passers-by pause in the driving Ipswich rain to take photos of us on their phones. I am a self-conscious audience member, and this is an unlikely outcome, but the show gets me there, much to my surprise.

Mega is a surprisingly intimate audio performance that casts you as the nine year-old Bryony Kimmings in the eventful summer of 1990. I say surprising, because the garish pink shell suits and brash frame as the artist sets up the format suggest that something more harsh and exposing may be asked of you. But as I switch on the joyfully retro cassette walkman, the tones are gentle – the voice talking quietly in my ears is warm and reminiscent.

A mash-up of period tunes and historic and personal detail from Kimmings’ life at the time effectively weaves an atmosphere, helpfully reinforced by the stoically 80s architecture of the ring road surrounding the New Wolsey Theatre. We are let loose to wander for fifteen minutes in this urban playground of underpasses and car parks and I appreciate the air of childlike ennui this sets up as we wait for mum to call us in. But a little more shape or instruction about things to look for or use on our outdoor adventure would have really helped me to get inside the world she was creating. For much of the show I could happily have simply sat on a bench and listening to her engaging storytelling and soundtrack. One or two neat interactive touches help with this, but there is more I think that could be explored about how the young Bryonys interact with their space and one another to really make use of the format in action here.

Self exposure has been Bryony’s Kimmings’ stock-in-trade in previous theatre shows Sex Idiot and 7 Day Drunk. She is mostly unflinching in her self presentation in this coming of age tale about a dawning sense of difference and disillusionment, though with a few insights misted by nostalgia toward the end.

Perhaps it’s partly because I share Kimminngs’ age, and the summer of 1990 that she evokes so painstakingly is one I also remember vividly for many of the reasons she describes, that this performance drew me in so effectively. But, on the evidence of the 60 year-old Samaritan dancing with me in the rain, this is a fun and charming experience that can sweetly draw us all back to a less self-conscious time.

www.bryonykimmings.com

Tom Wainwright: Buttercup

As a Lancashire girl myself, I have loads of reasons to take umbrage about Tom Wainwright’s second one-man show, a character-based monologue focused on a self-proclaimed ‘fat cow’ from my home county. Wainwright follows up his 2010 Edinburgh smash hit, Pedestrian, with Buttercup: ‘a fick, a fat and an ugly’ whose ignorance and credulity have made her the unlikely candidate for (or victim of) reality TV stardom. Buttercup sees no need to brush her teeth as she’s never been kissed and her family lifestyle of sitting and gorging in silence for hours in front of the TV is enough to move even a hard-faced ‘child’ producer from the BBC to tears. But the subject of this satire’s vitriol isn’t really Lancashire, its media land: that better place (probably in North London) where lives are made more meaningful through dint of better cooking, home décor and TV-sponsored craft projects.

It’s handled with deceptive acuity by this gummy, daft character performed engagingly in drag and a 1970s smock-tabard. Buttercup’s story is one of a character fully absorbed into the unrealities of reality TV: here America is a TV show and the presenters of Masterchef disintegrate into their foodstuff archetypes: a fish and a potato (I’ll leave you to figure out who is who). It’s a dystopian vision that is, like all great satire, believable enough to be chilling.

It’s a total pleasure to watch Wainwright perform: his exhilaratingly precise physicality supports quick-fire character changes, cycling through astutely drawn caricatures from Masterchef and TOWIE, as well as the nostril flaring, tail flicking bravura of straight talking Buttercup herself as she’s encouraged to model the harsh realities of her life to the templates offered by telly land. She’s an uncannily endearing character, stoic in the face of personal catastrophe and a media mauling, and ultimately her story is redemptive, as real feelings triumph over manufactured narratives.

How we fit into the critique is a little harder to discern. The show is placed in a rather swish café here at Pulse and at times we are decisively drawn into the action through some bits of audience participation and an improvised Q & A whose steel-fist-within-a-lacy-glove tone reminded me of the 90s talk-show The Mrs Merton Show. I didn’t miss any of the production values a studio context could have given, but wondered if the thoughtful Wainwright missed a trick in the way he deals with us, the audience – as complicit and implicit in the fiction-making process of theatre as any BBC producer.

Little Bulb: Goose Party

How can you describe Goose Party? They are a band searching for their identity. Not because they don’t have one, but rather, they have too many. During the course of the evening we cycle through country and prog folk, New Romantic, Glam Rock and disco. And that’s just the (fabulous and mad) costumes! The music smashes together genres from the power ballad through blues, soul and electro, often in the same song, with great musicality and atmosphere. If it’s sometimes schizophrenic, each transformation is never less than exhilaratingly joyous.

Goose Party are also the alter-ego band of Fringe darlings (and previous Total Theatre Award Winners), Little Bulb. This is company with a profound instinct for theatre. Music always plays a central role in their work and in this show takes centre stage. Essentially, it’s a gig.

I had a great time and so did the majority of the youthful crowd making up the audience at the end of a Bank Holiday weekend in Pulse, but there were a few baffled faces and disgruntled customers and, yes, a certain amount of onstage faff. There’s a theatrical frame to this performance, both in its festival context and implied in its hunt for identity, and it would only take a light touch of stagecraft, a little awareness of the theatre in your performance as a whole, to deliver it. Come on Little Bulb, we know you have it in you – now, make this a show as mad and brilliant as the music.

www.littlebulbtheatre.com

Tom Marshman: Legs 11

Tom Marshman’s new show is at its best when it poignantly draws our gaze downwards to examine the plight and power of our oft-disregarded pins. ’36 inches of blood, bone and muscle’, in his case, jauntily showcased in some frankly fabulous sparkly, star encrusted tights as the lights rise on his lanky frame.

This is a nostalgic show, from the opening film of showgirls taking us through their leggiest manoeuvres, infinitely multiplied across an art-deco shaped screen, to the martini rosso on a silver tray and 80s inspired songs by Sam Halmarack. Marshman takes us through eleven actions related to his evolving relationships with his legs. The most interesting are more metaphorical, as, for example, he teeters between past and present on a shoreline made up of knotted-together stockings. As the images become more literal – footage of him running the Bristol half-marathon wearing an enormous pair of wooden legs – I miss this theatricality. The show’s form multiplies, the songs in particular feel like they belong somewhere else, and contribute to a sense formlessness and gradual loss of momentum (not helped by a series of technical glitches with the projections which seemed to me unforgivable in a theatre with no less than three technicians in the box). I also found the emphasis on fame and celebrity difficult to care about: was Marshman’s appearance on Embarrassing Bodies discussing his varicose veins simply set up to produce material for this show? This kind of meta-referentiality seems to me to make the performance less not more interesting to a wider audience.

There’s some really touching material in here – ardent girls, desperate for their moment in the Pretty Polly spotlight, and an appeal for us to value the beauty of our own dancing pins – and Marshman is an endearing performer. I enjoyed spending an hour in his company. There’s something richer and more wistful hiding inside this show, about identity and appreciating your own gifts, but it feels rather muffled by some of the content at the moment – there’s a bit too much cosiness for there to be space for us to identify with the show’s heart.

www.tommarshman.com

Laura Mugridge and Tom Frankland: The Campsite

It’s a bright idea to draw together the range of work inspired by the current vogue for intimate performance into a day-long menu that audiences can skip between. Many venues have tried it, but none with quite the atmospheric verve of Laura Mugridge and Tom Frankland’s Campsite. Here audiences can choose between a selection of five characterful (literally: they have names) campervans each offering a rolling programme of performances for audiences of up to six squeezing into their kitschy interiors (but many one-on-one).

There are some sure fire hits here, with high quality, unsettling and really imaginative small-scale audience experiences such as Mamoru Iriguchi’s Mini Journey from a Man to a Woman, or Rachel Blackman and Emma Kilbey’s unsettling and joyful The Department of Unreliable Memoirs. I eavesdropped on Greg Wohead’s beautiful Just Inside my Tent (and other Safe Places), a truly intimate one-on-one coming of age journey whose gentle and richly evocative narrative brings audience and performer into genuine emotional as well as physical closeness aided by the masks of a simple wig and pair of google-eyed glasses.

Fergus Evans packs a lot into just ten minutes extracted from his full-length show my heart is hitchhiking down peachtree street. The three of us joining him in the campervan write stickers with our names and the place we think of as home, and Evans engages us all in a brief but gently perceptive conversation about how we feel about these places, whether they are where we now live or not. This is interwoven with his own softly-spoken but intensely lyrical memories of Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, its heat and haze, tarmac and transvestites, and his blunt if factually-questionable advice about living there (dealing with bears, snakes and alligators), which he carefully checks we’ve listened to and can recall. Finally, he gives us each a peach to take away. It’s rich and unhurried, and although in the full show I’m sure the links between the different registers would feel less abrupt, even in this shortened form its questions about home, memories and distance pack an emotional punch, wrapped, like the peaches, in a softly padded box.

Daniel Bye’s ‘performance lecture’ The Price of Everything – although this version for four of us in a tiny campervan is well adapted to be rather more intimate than ‘lecture’ might suggest – is spun from the notion that the third of a pint of milk he gives each of us cost him 17p, which is about what each of us in the UK contributes weekly to arts funding. But the show, even in this truncated twenty minutes, goes well beyond an argument about the arts, ranging from various ways of pricing our bodies, a bleakly logical satirical argument about NHS funding and the elderly, the price you can get for an air guitar on Ebay, and the proportion of a milk-filled Lake Wildemere we could buy if everyone in the caravan sold all their organs. Bye is an absolutely engaging presence, and the show is witty, passionate, well-constructed, and fundamentally truthful even when it’s full of lies – fun, thought-provoking and inspiring.

Other work is less fully formed and in an intimate setting feels rather less comfortable, highlighting its lapses and the amount it asks from us at this stage in its life. Ira Brans’s A Cure for Ageing may in time become a melancholic imagination of future selves but for now feels too raw for public consumption: we are taken through some difficult imagery and asked to contribute something personal to the future show which felt unearned. I wanted more back than a dark chocolate caramel.

The evening was rounded off with a mad musical rendition of the filmGhostbusters by Jonathan Monkhouse, Katy Schutte and Frankland himself as a bickering and playful troupe of actors fighting over how to perform their version of this cult classic. The result was very silly, with some genuinely funny lyrics and witty theatrical interpolations on and around Joni the camper van and a good edit of the film (which strangely left me wanting more of the original, alongside the songs). There’s lots of potential here for a cult audience experience which I can imagine working well in projected future contexts for the Campsite project as a whole.

Festival Director Emma Bettridge has described this Pulse-commissioned project (on A Younger Theatre) as a mini-Latitude and there is a genuine attempt in the Campsite’s fun form, playful atmosphere and gift-giving experience to engage audiences in a new way, but more work is needed. The process for accessing shows felt tough to navigate (an exchange of tokens and keys) and the programme really unclear. In a context where work could be stumbled upon in a more accessible way, this wouldn’t be a problem (an advantage even), but when you are asked to make choices as you come in about what you want to see it feels obscure and rather exclusive. For now, too much of what was happening here was artists watching one another’s work, and a more publicly friendly and outward-facing patter, either by the artists themselves or by others around the vans, would be a very positive development.

What a relief then to find, in the centre of town, amongst the throng of Ipswichians, all-girl live art troupe Three Step Endeavour attempting valiantly to engage with public audiences outside the town hall. Their tatty caravan providing the backdrop to a mini arena, their loud hailer, booming sound system and snazzy silver tracksuits drew attention from a range of bemused locals, and children in particular were quick to be lured into the arena for a 15 minute interactive description of their professional hopscotching skills. The company still have some serious learning to do about street arts schtick: their characters felt too thinly defined to give them enough of a mask to work through in dealing with potential audiences, which led to some rather plaintive interactions begging people to come and take part in the show. The arena itself felt a little closed off (and was perhaps the wrong way round, with the performers working in toward the enclosed audience rather than out on to the street), making it difficult for curious passers-by to drop in and out of the show. I desperately wanted the girls to put down their clipboards and have their script off pat, as constantly having to look down undermined the rhythm of their gags and limited the sense that they were really speaking to us. But it was great to see artists here connecting with audiences, people who almost certainly wouldn’t have otherwise engaged with the festival, offering them something funny and fun, and working hard to draw new people into their work.