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.

Theatre Re: Blind Man’s Song

It’s a bold move to premiere your new show at London International Mime Festival, and one which young international ensemble Theatre Re only partly pull off. Not unlike Theatre Ad Infinitum’s Light, which plays elsewhere in the festival, the focus of their show is on darkness, or more specifically living in blindness, and their ideas about the space this condition might open up for absolute imaginative freedom.

The opening image is arresting. A Beckettian, overcoated figure appears in the quiet of a blackout, his tiny black spectacles and stick identifying his condition. His gaunt frame reminds me of Mark Rylance in Endgame, a likeness that’s surely deliberate as the prevalence of battered top hats during the ensuing performance attests, though for reasons of content or simply atmosphere I’m not sure. As he presents himself in an absolute silence that seems to be a transposition of the blindness he embodies, I’m intrigued about the starkness of the world we are about to enter. The only properties are a black piano (nested with other instruments) and an all-black, hardwood bed. The man is locked in this all-black world, and the loops of sound that eventually break the silence and knot around him, familiar from Theatre Re’s previous Edinburgh hit The Little Soldiers, effectively capture a sense of being trapped with his own thoughts.

Yet this blind man has a song, he is a musician, and a beautifully lyrical one at that. When he takes up his rightful place amongst the instruments and pedals, performer Alex Judd creates beautiful patterns of melody that loop and swoop around the stage. More than this though, the blind man conjures two tightly-masked figures who seem to embody his fantasies (and later fears), living out experiences he can only imagine. It’s a lovely concept but highly abstract, and it’s here that the show starts to fall down. Theatre Re have developed a detailed choreographic score for these fantasy sequences, mining different relationship dynamics and encounters between this budding couple. A railway encounter, sharing a carriage; a day out; the charged meeting of hands. Yet often it feels like scenarios remain obscure – perhaps this is a side effect of existing as shape-shifting fantasy – the actions and images remain elusive, even as it becomes clearer that there are very specific ideas from which they are drawn. More difficult, the masked characters remain as blank as their visages – there’s not enough specificity in their physical characterisation to give us something to care about and it feels like the company have underestimated the power of the mask to throw absolute focus on to the body. Beautiful and detailed choreography can’t be enough when we lack facial expressions to guide us – we are looking for much more specific clues in rhythm and reaction, and the show’s central sections become a melange of moments that are rather lovely to look at (and certainly to listen to) but generally feel hard to navigate.

There are flashes of clarity, such as a waltz with the bedframe and a lovely physical metaphor for the sharing of oneself with a lover. And there are several moments which reach for magic and may become magical as the material settles in.

Theatre Re are based in London and there’s a sense that they are being framed as the next generation of artists in the festival. There is certainly a boldness and promise to their vision, they just need to give more focus to the detail of their form. Billed alongside the likes of Gecko, they are in the right place to get inspired.

Visible: Who Do We Think We Are?

Photo John Haynes

The small, thrust stage is full of voices. Moving bodies hurry from side to side. Fragments of stories start and stop, overlapping and interrupting. There are a number of reasons this feels exceptional. The cast is unexpectedly large – ten performers plus a musician – who remain with us in the space throughout, sitting on either side of the stage in the front row or changing in full view in the corners. And all of them are aged at least 60. It isn’t until you encounter a stage full of older performers that you realise how unusual this feels. There are trends being bucked here: Visible – Britain’s only professional theatre ensemble made up entirely of ‘older’ performers – operates outside the economies of scale that constrain many theatre makers in this country and its very raison d’être is to create meaningful performance opportunities for such artists whose work might otherwise be being sidelined.

So what do they do with these intriguing principles? They have collaboratively devised a show that only they can tell. Each individual reaches into their own family and personal history to recount the lived experience of events from just before the outbreak of the First World War to the present day. Writer and Artistic Director Sonja Linden (previous founder of iceandfire) selects a dizzying array of story fragments that crosses continents and class to achieve a genuine sense of history in all its clamorous multitudinousness. As each painful, joyous experience is recalled or recounted other company members effortlessly complete scenes round the teller using simple physical storytelling, live music and considerable performance skill (which is to be expected from a company whose experience spans most major theatre and dance companies in the UK) accompanied by dynamic video and lighting design which very effectively shift tone and atmosphere. It’s real ensemble storytelling and the feeling grows that we are witnessing something summative in its rich variegation: the sheer weight of stories accumulate as a sense of history moving through time and across the globe.

Of course, such stories are not in fact the preserve of individual memories or at least in this, of all years, don’t feel like they are. In 2014 we have been drenched in recollection and histories of the trenches and tales of the wrenching partings and indignities of the Holocaust are all too familiar. The first half of the play, which covers these periods, can sometimes feel muddied by familiar tropes, the personal detail of the stories getting lost (although there’s a theatrical coup in the presentation of the nuclear bomb as the ending of an era). Where the storytelling comes in to its own however is from the 60s onwards and it’s no coincidence that this too is where the performers start to tell their own memories rather than sharing stories from previous generations. As its material is more fully owned the power and impact of the form they are working manifests on stage in full heart and voice (literally, in a virtuoso solo rendition of Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In).

What perhaps feels most profound is the gradual realisation that the material doesn’t only transcend the personal but transcends the physical age of the bodies before us. This is a testament to both the form the company have devised and the considerable skill and verve on display in its performance. Theatre is, notoriously, a young person’s game, but in a closing sequence set in a registrar’s office at the hospital we completely share the storyteller’s frustration and horror about being gently but persistently patronised for her age – it simply feels preposterous. This show stops you looking at the physical limitations of age and time and genuinely, openhandedly shares the person underneath. Beautiful.

Touretteshero: Backstage in Biscuit Land

This first foray by Jess Thom into performance making scooped the 2014 Total Theatre Emerging Artist award at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe. The show develops from her successful work in blogging and publishing that has made her alter ego, Touretteshero, a much loved spokesperson for the illness. And it’s an illness that, despite its fascinating pull, is widely misunderstood and here takes centre stage.

In this two hander Thom, playing herself, sets out to inform and entertain about the uncomfortable and inspiring realities of her life living with Tourettes, using her illness as both subject and medium. Continuously (and yet always surprisingly) affected by a variety of physical and verbal ‘tics’, the performance has the propensity at any moment to veer off into uncharted territory by the wild riffs that overtake Thom’s body. Keeping us (roughly) on track is the job of onstage partner ‘Chopin’ (Jess Mabel Jones), the first in what becomes clear is a host of offstage supporting cast whose constant presence is necessary to keep Thom safe and functioning.

The show powerfully portrays the realities of living with this debilitating illness, most engaging and affecting because so much of it is so funny. There are certainly many total theatre languages in play: Chopin animates onstage devices to illustrate memories, anecdotes and fantasies by playing with puppets, absurd and giant props, and handheld lighting effects that make the most of an eclectic set (which, the pair admit, is made up from a random list of items picked by Jess during the rehearsal process). Improvisation plays a key part, with a couple of improvised quizzes making the most of the brilliantly absurd shifts in subject that the tics can direct. The show is structured meta-theatrically, exploring the experiences (both good and bad) that spurred Thom to make it. These explanations bring to life very straightforwardly the realities of her experiences – both in their accounts (living with constant care day and night, being able to hold down a job) and through direct, uncontrollable demonstration (slapping herself repeatedly, painfully, in the face as she tries to eat a bowl of strawberries). It is an uncomfortable truth that it feels deeply courageous to show, unflinchingly, the realities of living with disability live on stage.

There are two elements that set the production apart though. Jess’s verbal ticks are outbursts of uncontrollable lyrical mashup, slamming together celebrity, profundity and mundanity to make images and stories that are hilarious and often inspired. Secondly the inescapable liveness of this performance: we are not only backstage, we are all on stage, living with Jess through every glorious, difficult minute. No illusion and no script could withstand the unremitting realness of the Tourettes symptoms whose presence on stage is shared with grace and warmth by both performers – it’s hard to imagine a more fitting form for Touretteshero’s work.

Hope Chiang: Puzzle the Puzzle

Late at night, high up in the C Chambers street, a little bit of magic is unfolding in this beautiful small scale show imported from the Far East as part of the showcase programme Made in Macau. Originally created for bookshops, this corner room is dolled with piles and shelves of books and illuminated only by built-in lamps that create coloured shadow shapes and draw our eyes toward miniature features like a string of tiny post it notes.

In the centre of the room a young man is sitting, restlessly at his desk. He is, we learn, a poet and struggling to write, staring disconsolately into space, occasionally scrunching up his efforts. Fortunately his environment bristles with morsels of possible inspiration. It is animated by the second performer, masked head to toe in black like a puppetry ninja, her body stretching into shapes that reflect and amplify his interior worlds. Her presence could easily feel naive in the small space, even awkward. But from the off, the company are already subverting the form – keeping the performance moving forward and transforming.

The show embodies the classic object theatre impulse of finding the poetry in the everyday. First, his anguish emerges in her contortions and then, by successive drips, inspiration appears, drawn from the literature that surrounds him, the architecture of the room we share, the world echoing up for the street below. The young woman unmasks and speaks directly to us, narrating his world and ours. Her translation is occasionally a little stilted but there is enough information and poetry to net together the myriad moments of object storytelling that make up the performance. As interlocutor she playfully offers animated provocations using a delicate miniature theatre – a tiny show, a toy car, a lighthouse bringing to life the many drama real and imagined that multiply in the room.

This is a delicate and rather lovely show in its late night slot and is presented with subtle confidence in unusual form rarely encountered in British theatre and with heartfelt style. A little gem.

Tim Hopkins & Co: Burger Van

In the decidedly inauspicious surroundings of the Thistle Hotel lobby, outside the gents and inside a large shopping centre, we wait to be invited into a carpeted conference room. Inside, a burger franchise banner has been overlaid on the Freestival flash atop a loosely hung backdrop of a black curtain. At a table on the floor, two uncomfortable looking young men are hovering listlessly. This table is their burger van. This is not a set of circumstances that inspire confidence in the theatrical experience but what follows is an hour of joyous performance whose life, like our own (however much we might want to escape into the Fringe’s glamour), feels completely at home among these depressing corporate trappings.

Contrary to its context, this is a highly theatrical production offered open-handedly on a shoestring. Two battered chopping boards, a hand-drawn cardboard radio, a couple of aprons, and assorted headgear form the understated props. The artists work in partnership with Sh!t Theatre, last year’s recipients of the Total Theatre Emerging Artist Award, who provide musical accompaniment, sound effects, and puppetry, metatheatrically animating the edges of the performance world so that the two boys can marinade in the misery of their reality. It’s an entirely satisfying format that establishes a strong theatrical style and arch inclusivity with the audience as well as space to delve into the bleakness and quiet desperation of the boys’ deadened life in the van, in a car park, and later, on tour. I was reminded of early Kevin Smith films or even The Office rejuvenated for a new generation: overqualified, underemployed, and trapped.

This is a really enjoyable production whose careful crafting belies its casual tone. A witty, smart dramaturgy of jump cuts, inappropriate underscores and menacing, cartoonish burger puppets give us everything we need to open up a real connection and sympathy to the characters and their world, and there’s oodles of silliness with both men giving sharply detailed comic performances whose bleak bite we can taste. Brilliantly unexpected and building to a wild and surreal finale that takes us with it every strange step of the way, this is a wonderful example of how theatrical skill, commitment, and a bit of style can make magic in the most unlikely of places. And like the real Fringe ought to be, it’s free!