Long Live The Little Knife Photo-Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

Fire Exit / David Leddy: Long Live the Little Knife

Long Live The Little Knife Photo-Tommy Ga-Ken WanI’m late to the party with this show, much feted at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and have just a few comments to add to Dorothy Max Prior’s summary hot from the festival. David Leddy is known for his creative pushing of site specific performance and it’s very interesting to encounter his work in a studio, albeit one masked by spattered dust sheets mirroring the Jackson Pollock painting at his story’s heart. Leddy’s work takes the richness and precision of new writing and uses the context of unusual sitings to open up less obvious metatheatrical implications for audiences. Here, sitting mostly in the Dome Studio’s comfy rake (though with a chosen few transported to makeshift wings, here creating a sort of thrust stage) the meta-references are in the text itself: a play of misconception, a disorienting warp of character performance (complete with shifting accents and wildly ranging performance styles), and downright lying. This is a show all about performance, and so its site-specificity remains.

The theatre, however, is not put to its regular use. All of the lighting – a weird array of mismatched industrial practicals – has been absconded from a building site, and along with the sound effects, OHP, slide projections, and smoke machine, are operated by a downstage and very present stage manager. There’s a deep understated theatre craft here in Leddy’s direction as he mines the metaphorical possibilities of shadow play, and lights as objects, to underscore the constantly shifting relationships between husband and wife, victim and perp, story and ‘reality’.

At the heart of the show’s fantastical tale – it’s a heist caper, it’s a comi-tragic underworld drama – is the story of a marriage. Where the production is at its most exhilarating is in the balancing act achieved between wit and heart. The incursions of reality – a series of miscarriages (delivered, of course, by the stage manager, as a collection of heavily dropping industrial-thickness red rubber gloves), flashes of real conflict and insecurity between the couple – gradually paint their own picture where the ‘artistry of swindle’ is a compulsive strategy for retreating from more painful realities in their lives. The show achieves the perfect double bluff – we end up caring deeply for these characters at the same time as trusting them not a jot (even the final apparent resolution feels a touch too fantastical: its tidiness a little self-aware). The performance is rush of verbal, theatrical dexterity that, even as it proclaims itself all lies, paints characters and story who we come to really feel for.

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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.