Author Archives: Marigold Hughes

Frozen Light: The Forest

Today is going to be different, we are told: a different day in the forest. The lights are dimmed, and the room is soft; crafted foliage and autumnal textures lull us into the mythic lair of the story. The forest keeper, Ivy (Lucy Garland) draws us to her realm. The performance is designed for adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities, and the audience are seated in small clusters around the space. We meet two of the people that happen to have come into the forest today: Rob  (Al Watts), a frozen statue from the city; and Thea (Amber Onet Gregory), a wandering poet.

Ivy sings, speaks and also signs: the forest is a place for all of us. The performers communicate with real care and attention, any twee-ness being kept at bay by the luminous warmth of all involved. Ivy and Thea visit each audience member and sing/sign for and with them, weaving each of their names into their song. It is genuinely moving – today’s adventure is certainly one we are all on together.

Thea, in a fit of self-doubt, tears up her scribbled musings and these get scattered around the forest floor, and are also lightly sprinkled over the audience. Rob, coming across one of these shreds, is struck by the words he finds and enters the forest to uncover their creator. Thea’s and Rob’s journeys towards each other provide the path and propel us through the wilds of the unknown, but it’s the unfolding of the forest itself that draws us in.

The performers are keen to make sense and give sense to their story; the forest comes to life in a palette of textures, sounds and smells. As Rob wanders deeper into the cold woods, he collects wood for the fire and offers it to us to smell: smoky, charred and soft. The fire sparks into life. As Thea tastes the fruits of the forest, we are offered apricots and citrus spray is offered to our awaiting taste buds. As the storm builds, the air above us is sprayed with water, and wind is blown into our faces. In the raging skies, Thea ‘s notebook is swept away and Rob’s guitar blown into the wilds, but under Ivy’s control and guiding hands, each collects what the other needs and they are brought together to return these gifts.

Frozen Light tap into theatre’s sensory sphere with care, precision and skill, building both an environment and a narrative with real light and shade. Al Watts’ inventive score gives pulse and purpose to the unfolding story, and the detail of the interactions between performer and audience, and objects and audience, are considered and intricate.

The Forest is a moving journey into the place where we can find – and be accepted – by each other, told by a company of artists who care about the story they are telling, and are equipped with the tools to tell it. It was a different day in the forest indeed.

 

 

Hijinx Theatre Company with Blind Summit: Meet Fred

Fred’s time has come. It comes to us all, sooner or later – the time when we realise who we are and what we are made of. Fred? Well, he’s a puppet. Stitched from canvas, stuffing and seams. Fred spots bigger hands behind his own – shocking! He sees giant fingers wrapped around his feet – untenable!  Nimbly executed and extremely funny, a battle ensues between puppeteers and puppet as Fred struggles against this control and realises that he is, quite literally, in the hands of others.

Hijinx produces work with actors with learning disabilities – and both learning disabled and non learning disabled actors perform in Meet Fred. With blade sharp wit and acute mastery of form, Hijinx – in association with the current masters of contemporary puppetry, Blind Summit – draw on puppetry conventions to illustrate the metaphorical strings (he’s actually a rod puppet) that manipulate Fred.  The echoes between him and the lives of the learning disabled performers are clear:  Fred is not the only one who is being manipulated.

The director, Ben Pettitt-Wade, in role as ‘the director’, a version of himself, tells Fred that he is in a show: a show that is all about him. Fred asks to see the script, Ben tells him that he doesn’t need one – that it is his life.  Fred finds himself in the Job Centre where the officious employee, played by Richard Newham, instructs him to take a job – the options: Removal man? Hardly ideal for a three-foot tall puppet. Swimming instructor? Canvas and water don’t mix. Children’s entertainer? How patronising!  The dialogue is swift and smart. Fred is no angel – his quick-witted profanities ensure that the piece is refreshing unwholesome and steers far away from any temptation to infantalise disability. Or puppets. Hijinx display a hugely impressive command of theatricality, with moments of real genius – and Dan McGowan, Morgan Thomas and Craig Quat bring Fred to life with seamless dexterity and flair.

Mapped out in blackboard and chalk is the life that waits for him: date night, job interview, waking up routine, rock bottom. It has all been arranged – Fred doesn’t have much of a say. Pettitt-Wade has set up a profile for him on Guardian Soulmates and Fred is geared up for a good bit of puppet-love. Sadly, the dreamy Lucille (Lindsay Foster) prefers actual humans and Fred is left out in the cold. Things go from bad to worse when he is informed that his PLA (Puppet Living Allowance) is going to be cut. Fred exists as a kind of everyman for the dispossessed and disenfranchised: the injustices he suffers echo subtly and artfully with those faced by his human peers

One such peer is Martin, the stage manager. Martin has Down’s Syndrome: a real life Fred. He has spent the show being ordered about by Pettitt-Wade’s ‘director’ with a disdain verging on contempt, but a revolt is waiting in the wings. As Fred as about to end it all, Martin sneaks in to take control of Fred’s legs and give him back his life. The director walks out and both Fred and Martin emerge triumphant: a subtle and moving testament to the power of the people (and the puppets).

Packed full of first-rate theatrical invention, irreverent revelling, and with an urgent human story at its heart, Meet Fred is a real marvel. Essential viewing for humans and puppets everywhere.

 

 

Bucket Club: Fossils

Two dinosaurs are held next to one another: the little one is a baby, the big one is 31; the little one is 8 – the big one, 39; the little one is 16 – the big one is… gone.

Vanessa (Helen Vinton), chief dinosaur manipulator and post-doctoral researcher, is a white-coat-clad scientist, with two PhD students that she is supervising: Myles (David Ridley) and Dom (Adam Farrell). Vanessa is serious about science, Myles and Dom are serious about the pub. They rub along with a mixture of exasperation, wit and bright-eyed fervour.

Building a well-oiled machine of scientific exploration, the live score fizzes and whirrs and the three performers click into each other, the action, and the tools of their trade with complete precision and scalpel-sharp timing. Spark and spirit burn bright as Miles and Dom provide the perfect clowns (part geek-chic, part Fresh Meat) to Vanessa’s grit and drive. Helen Vinton plays Vanessa with perfect steeliness, with Ridley and Farrell picking up the other characters in her story with agility. Vanessa’s dreams are clear: she is going to be a tenured professor by the time she is 35. But that’s before the Loch Ness monster rears its head.  Again.

The calls begin once more: the Daily Mail, the this, the that. Vanessa shuns and spurns the approaches until Nature magazine calls: it is the very beacon of scientific journalism, the Guardian of the white-coat world. They ask her to write a feature article about the Loch Ness monster – the subject of her father’s own scientific research. Vanessa cannot refuse and heads off on her journey that not only thrusts her into the mystery of Loch Ness, but also into her missing father: a creature no less elusive than the monster itself.

When Vanessa, Dom and the story head up the A1 and into the depths of Loch Ness, she comes across her father’s old caravan, now inhabited by her father’s co-monster hunter, Brian. She finds a jumper of her dad’s and puts it on: it is an understated moment of real sadness and veiled hope…

Crafted with clear theatrical confidence by director Nel Crouch and designer Rebecca Jane Wood, the tools of the scientific world – tanks of water, pipettes, beakers – become the storyteller’s kit. The tanks of water become the pond; when Vanessa and Dom step into the water, they splash each other with water from their pipettes. Models of dinosaurs – those monuments to the past – are manipulated to play other characters in the unfolding tale.

Fossils is a beautifully hewn story about how we connect to the past, and how our lives are shaped by the no-longer living things we carry with us. The emotion creeps up on you, gently and without fanfare:  the tricks, wit and japes of the initial theatrical frivolity dissolving into a granite-hard nub of sadness. A gem of a piece by Bucket Club, a company taking its own very solid place in the world.

 

 

 

Aurora Nova/ Andrew Carlberg/ Bojana Novakovic: The Blind Date Project

Cilla Black this ain’t: three-ways, anal sex with small penises, and porn preferences are some of the things that pop up in this rollercoaster of a blind date. Bojana Novakovic certainly has more dates a week than the average single urbanite: each night of the festival, in her role as ‘Anna’, she meets a new companion for a night of chatting, flirting and singing. They are, after all, in a karaoke bar (the cabaret bar of Zoo Southside requisitioned for the purpose). A karaoke bar run by a veritable dominatrix of a lady, a host/MC with a quick tongue and no patience for small talk.

As we enter, the host is singing – people come in, settle into seats, drink and chat. We are invited to submit our karaoke requests. The lights dim on the stage and come up on the bar, where Novakovic/Anna waits. A man enters – Simon – with a bunch of flowers. He is endearingly awkward and she is refreshingly forward. On our tables, there is a menu stating that the performers have no script, that each night is completely improvised with the actors receiving instructions from the director via SMS.

Watching the date unfold is as thrilling and entertaining as you might expect. Anna fires questions at her victim with loose abandon (she later reveals that her friends have suggested she date someone younger who she can control). He responds with a combination of only faintly suppressed surprise and gamely repartee. She is definitely wearing the proverbial trousers.  Their phones ring, buzz and bleep – punctuating their conversation and presenting new challenges for them to incorporate into their budding romance. The sonic intrusions sadly seem completely normal within the world of the date.

Anna then has the idea of them choosing karaoke songs for each to sing to each other, based on their profile. When their songs come up, they sing to each other and to us. As each of them sing, attention shifts to them and to other people in the bar – watching, chatting, in their own worlds of night-time entertainment. It is a simple, but smart format. Anna and Simon are two people in a room, all there for the same reason – they just happen to be the ones with the spotlight on them. In that sense, it could be any of us (but thank God it isn’t). The sense that we share the same space, and that anything can happen draws us in and makes us a part of what is happening. We feel more connected to them – and to each other. It is a playful and clever construct: live, immediate and entirely unpredictable.

At one point, the chap receives a phone call from his mum – he lies about who he is with and what he is doing, his date gets shirty. She threatens to walk out, but he manages to make it up to her and eventually, they head into the night together. The Blind Date Project is a riotously funny evening that will chime with daters everywhere.

 

 

The Flanagan Collective/ Joanne Hartstone: Snakes and Giants

Holly is 27, she is 5 ft 7in. Veronica is 26, she is 5 ft 5in. Not giants by any definition, but thankfully not snakes either. Radiating openness and brimming with warmth, Holly tells us she will be telling the tale of an older lady, Shenna, and Veronica, that of a younger one, Ali. Both of these women are standing on the edge of a cliff on 20 June 2016 – that moment of the summer solstice, when the sun comes down and the moon comes up, and where the storm will rage till the land falls.

The tales unfold and as they do, folk song, lyrical prose and movement interweave to create the lives of these two characters. Shenna has been a giant in her world, a tall strong lady who strides through the wilds of her homeland; a woman carved from the same stuff as the crags, the cliffs and the earth, strong and un-shiftable, until she begins to shrink into her death. Ali, meanwhile, is growing into her life, a 29-year-old, who has recently separated from her fiancée and, mourning the lack of her, finds herself in a spacious empty flat, dwarfed by its relative enormity. Shenna, as her older self, sits in a day centre, grips a teapot and talks to the ‘lady with the kind eyes’ about her life. Ali, meanwhile, is coming to terms with what the future now means for her. Both, in different ways, seem to waiting for the thing that will change them; waiting for their own perfect storms.

Timeless folk songs, sung with heartfelt spirit in deep rich tones, brush against prattle about Ikea flatpack furniture; the enormity of life that builds itself around us and the tiny details of the modern everyday happily co-existing.  Holly Beasley Carrigan and Veronica Hare tell this tale with complete commitment. It is entirely evident that they believe and relish in the stories of these women and what we can take from their lives. At times, however, the individual journeys are not always easy to follow and the stories crack, the choreographed movement seems slightly out of place and under developed, and there is a lack of tautness in the narrative.

When the ending comes, and the women are back on their edges of their cliff – waiting for the storm – they turn to each other and dance; whatever they have fought against and lost becoming irrelevant. They look into the night, at each other – and dance. Freely and with joy. The moment almost mirrors the piece: any narrative or stylistic flaws being compensated for by the warmth and soul of the performers that dance its steps. The Flanagan Collective has created a piece of understated charisma – heartfelt, soulful and moving.