Author Archives: Charlotte Smith

Endgame

That’s me. Not in the photo, although perhaps I have morphed into a giant triangle, illusion or rewind button during the Edinburgh festival, and not actually noticed. But in the Scots sense of ‘that’s me done’, ‘I’m out of here’.

A brief tally: 19 reviews, five blog entries, over 40 trains, three two-hour meetings and one lasting a good five hours, one birthday, one babysitting session, zero romance, eight low-calorie energy drinks… how much information do you want?

In terms of getting an overview of the festival, it’s early days yet. For reviewing, it makes sense to go up during the first weeks. But equally, there’s a lot of unfinished business. Winners and losers, trends and outliers are still becoming clearer.

Audience interaction is in the spotlight (see Max’s previous blog). The discussion of Ontroerend Goed’s Audience reminds me of So you think this is offensive now? by Brendon Burns, which won the main comedy award in 2007. In that case, the bullied audience member was revealed as a plant, but the critics kept the secret throughout the festival. This year, White Rabbit, Red Rabbit definitely created an unusual audience dynamic. But F&M’s parting shot in Pop Centre Plus – ‘we’ve been Frisky & Mannish and you’ve been superfluous’ – was only partly tongue in cheek. Their talent dwarfed the audience. And in other cases, contrived audience participation can be painful.

Perhaps the debate about interactivity is linked to technology. Sites like Facebook, for which people photograph events before experiencing them, make participation inescapable. However, theatre also has a great recalcitrance with technology. To the extent that it is live, in the moment, paring down the mediation to bare the soul, it’s the enemy of superficial and virtual interactivity. However, on the negative side, theatre can also be self-indulgent, prone to nostalgia and sentimentalism. This can become a lack of engagement with thorny current issues.

Every year in Edinburgh, there are some shows that got away. I wish I’d seenDance MarathonDoctor Brown: Becaves and maybe the Technodelic Comedy Show. I didn’t see If you choreograph me, you will feel better because it’s for men only, and I haven’t caught Audience (and the show may now have changed too, so I’ll never see the performance everyone was talking about). The whole of the comedy and music sections of the fringe programme are unexplored. For Total Theatre, I see circus, mime, puppetry (apparently there’s a surprising amount of puppetry this year), streets arts, devised and experimental work. Not straight, late-night, beery stand-up.

There are also always postscripts with reviews. Painful as it is, sometimes you would like to revise your opinion. It’s too late, of course. The review is an impression at a particular moment in time, already published and damned. In the past, I’ve given a cheerful and broadly supportive review for a local newspaper, only to see the national critics pan a show. ‘I meant hit-you-round-the-head stunning, not really impressive, sorry…’

So this year, I wonder whether my review of Swamp Juice was a bit lukewarm and Circolombia deserved a more positive write-up. Leo still gets my vote. However, it was put in perspective when I heard about the day out that my two-year-old niece, her cousins aged about eight and ten, my sister, her partner, his brother and his girlfriend had at Glasgow Science Centre (pictured) on Saturday. They played wonderful games with illusion and perspective, producing visual tricks such as climbing up a skyscraper or ninety-degree rotated walls that seemed remarkably similar to the starting-point for Leo.

Now it’s back on the ‘sleeper’ train for work tomorrow. As usual, it’s been a thought-provoking, tiring festival. The shortlist for the Total Theatre Awards may have been published by the time you read this. You can’t press the rewind button, anyhow.

Bunk Puppets and Scamp Theatre: Swamp Juice

Bunk Puppets and Scamp Theatre: Swamp Juice

Bunk Puppets and Scamp Theatre: Swamp Juice

Swamp Juice offers shadow puppetry to tickle the senses of adults and children alike. It’s a jiggling, gobbling journey of rolling eyes, wagging chins, monsters with wiry hair and pincer-like attacks.

The show is also always watchable on the two levels of projected and live movement. It opens up the workings of the puppetry, so one moment you are watching a tinsel and cardboard cut-out or undulating hand movements, and the next your eyes are drawn to the black-and-white shadow. Another dimension is added with 3D glasses, so a jellyfish swerves unnervingly towards you…

Swamp Juice is presented by Canadian puppeteer Jeff Achtem in madcap professor style. He adds some humorous asides (‘don’t worry, kids, it’s not a documentary’) and directions, as well as heartfelt marketing at the end. His persona and the slightly backyard, home-made feel may not appeal to everyone, but they do not detract from the skill involved.

Swamp Juice is based around visual games more than a clear narrative. Or perhaps the plot got a bit lost. However, you remember the bird flying within the audience and on a side wall, the jazzy underwater bubbles, the two-headed creature that combined frog, beetle and wings.

Expectations were high for this show (unscientific it may be, but someone in a queue volunteered during a flyering moment that this was the best thing they’d seen all festival). For me it was not mind-blowing or soul-searching, but consistently, impressively visually inventive. Swamp Juice certainly shows dedication and delight in puppetry.

www.scamptheatre.com

Nutshell: Allotment

Nutshell: Allotment

Nutshell: Allotment

‘It’s a bit like swimming in a loch, it’s fine after a few minutes,’ says one of the stalwart crew for Allotment, to help the rain-soaked audience along. We are also told cheerfully that ‘it’s a British show with British weather’. In some ways they overcompensate: every effort is made to keep us comfortable, with ‘speed wiping’ of seats, tea and sympathy. There’s no beating about the bush with the promised scones either; these are dished out efficiently on the way in.

If the novelty of site-specific theatre has faded, Allotment injects some energy into the genre. The sights and smells of the plots slot perfectly into the narrative. Arguably, the site-specificity reaches beyond the performance too. I approached a crowd thinking this was the Assembly, only to realise it was probably ‘mums in the park’, but got the necessary location by asking a breathless American jogger whether he’d seen a theatre show.

Nicola Jo Cully and Pauline Goldsmith put in stellar performances as sisters Maddy and Dora. These characters have welly, literally and metaphorically. They do not flinch on a journey from Sindy dolls to sexual jealousy, with plenty of mud and sibling rivalry along the way. Although very occasionally the direction might not work for all sightlines, when you looked the actors in the eyes, there was no glimmer of doubt and certainly no escape.

Jules Horne’s writing breathes life into the characters and has an earthy, sensuous quality. Maddy and Dora both talk about each other and themselves in the third person, which is a nice narrative touch. However, arguably the ‘cradle to the grave’ scope of the story, with lines such as ‘time passed’ and a final goodbye, is ambitious and sometimes makes the piece oddly slight.

This show did elicit something of a personal reaction. I was quite happy to accept these women’s friendship and homemade fudge, but found something faintly appalling about their unfulfilled, childless lives. Both supported by their sister and trapped in this relationship, each insisting that they know best, it’s debatable which of Maddy and Dora killed the other first.

Site-specificity might be a harder sell these days, if people don’t necessarily want to travel, pay or get wet for a gimmick. However, Allotment succeeds in creating an unusual atmosphere with its two struggling sisters. It also leaves your mind full of varieties of potato, coriander, sweet peas, strawberries, everlasting spinach, medlar, cornflowers, flamingos and boys.

www.nutshelltheatre.co.uk

Backhand Theatre: Images

Backhand Theatre: Images

Backhand Theatre: Images

Images explores urban isolation through spoken word, dance, circus and some projection. It’s billed as a promenade performance, so is perhaps wrong for the space at C eca, because all this seems to mean is that some of the audience have chairs while others sit on the floor.

The text, by Jake Linzey of Backhand Theatre, was often trite. Its metaphorical summit was commuters being squeezed into trains like toothpaste, and the lines included, ‘It’s a fascinating thing, kissing.’ Even more perplexing was the idea of ‘soaking in the saturation of the rain’.

The two young performers, Katy Helps and Megan Elizabeth Pitt, have grace and poise. However, the movement is more tantalising than satisfying. The trapeze and dance moves were carefully executed, but rather limited. The performers did make a valiant effort with the narrative too. It therefore seems odd that they are not credited on any programme, website or other information.

The theme of emptiness in a mediated, empty London had potential. You could agree with the final question about what it takes to get people together in a room, and perhaps with the blatant longing for touch, skin, kisses, warmth and smell. The relationship between the two women was also slightly intriguing – were they sisters, childhood friends, even lovers?

However, the weaknesses of the writing made Images a limp experience for me. To a soundtrack including Moby, it became cloying. That said, the show did seem to resonate with a full, young audience. It is one of several productions by Backhand Theatre, so perhaps part of a wider experiment.

Frisky & Mannish: Pop Centre Plus

Frisky & Mannish: Pop Centre Plus

Frisky & Mannish: Pop Centre Plus

Frisky & Mannish really do cut the mustard. I’m not just talking about the Cluedo-style yellow bodice that Laura Corcoran sports as part of a poptastic outfit. Over the last three years, they have been a smash hit at the Fringe. They deliver on their reputation. They’re good, and they know it.

Pop Centre Plus sends up a career mentoring session (although when it came to the choice of the CV workshop or Frisky’s shoes, we can see which had the edge…). The audience are divided into five types or ‘career paths’, starting with Razorlight (those with wonderful hair but little other talent) and encompassing Britney, Justin Bieber, Elvis and Echo.

This gives a coherent framework into which are worked brilliant numbers such as the eleven phases of Madonna (a ‘motivational case study’). Frisky & Mannish’s core trick is surreal juxtaposition of songs and styles, so we have ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ in the style of 17th Century opera. There’s satire of grime (‘gram’) that is spot on and an explicit but hilarious Justin Bieber recipe. Then the lights go low and we have a mock charity appeal (cheques to F&M on departure, if you’re not busy buying their merchandise) for child stars gone wrong. They steer clear of pop’s real tragedies (Michael Jackson or Amy Winehouse) but have great fun with the likes of Nelly Furtado, George Michael and Charlotte Church.

The audience participation culminates in a five-strong ‘man band’ to which Frisky rattles out instructions. They produce some wonderful poses when told to touch each other inappropriately, lip-synch with panache and look like a plausible product on a swiftly produced album cover.

At the heart of Frisky & Mannish is vocal precision as well as biting satire – the singing is exceptional. Laura Corcoran’s voice in particular soars and pumps, but Matthew Floyd Jones also hits some very high notes. You worry needlessly that she might get hoarse from shouting and screeching in between.

Both performers have great charisma and insouciance. They are smart, and seem to disdain the dangers of pop. There is a scene in which Frisky mutters about her training but bends over a table for sexual punishment, farmyard-style. Otherwise they seem too sassy to be victims of their success.

The mad biting cabaret has a famous ending too. Their final number is a startling, sexy rendition of nursery rhymes including ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Old Macdonald Had A Farm’, which had middle-aged men in the audience positively drooling. And the parting shot? ‘We’ve been Frisky & Mannish, and you’ve been… superfluous.’

www.friskyandmannish.co.uk