She no longer wants to talk about getting stripped; she now wants to talk about getting dressed. She sits behind a sewing machine, her lit face rapt in concentration, her beautiful pre-Raphaelite auburn curls falling forward. The machine judders along. ‘Wearing clothes I have made is the most honest way I have of being in the world.’
Lydia Higginson is a dress designer. She used to be a costume designer, and once made three ultra-theatrical outfits for her three best friends – a cheery clown suit for Josie, a feisty flapper outfit for Olivia, and a pretty pink prom-queen number for Nobahar. They were outfits for a show never made – except now the four school friends are back together making the show.
But it’s a different show to what might have been. Not long after making those costumes, when she was just 19 and travelling overseas on her gap year, Lydia was stripped, beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang of ten men who broke into the house she was staying in. We learn that when Lydia returned home to the UK, she vowed to replace every item in her wardrobe with something new she’d made for herself. This literal re-dressing became her healing tool.
She later approached her old school friend Josie Dale-Jones, an emerging theatre-maker and founder of ThisEgg, to ask if she might want to make a show about ‘the robbery’ (which is how Lydia refers to the attack). The process of decision-making finds its way into the final show: Will I be seen as attention-grabbing, asks Lydia. Do I want my life on display in this way? She is cool and calm in her re-telling of the horrible facts of the assault – this low-key delivery far more affecting than any emotive ‘acting’ might be.
Having decided she would take up the challenge, Josie persuaded Lydia to be in it, and from there it soon become obvious that dancer Liv (Olivia Norris) and singer Nobahar (Mahdavi) ought to be too.
Those original fantastical costumes become both a vehicle for exploring the archetypal characters that might have been in that non-existent show, and an ironic commentary on lost innocence. They are Showgirls – the name of a song sung by Nobahar, one of her own compositions. Choreography for the show is by Olivia, and of course costumes by Lydia.
But there are other clothes here too. Black dance outfits peeled back to reveal naked backs – spines – that offer support to each other. At one point, there’s a heap of clothes lying on the floor, Lydia lying in them like a quivering bird in a nest, as Nobahar sings to her gently. And one by one, all four don beautiful wild-silk dresses – teal and old-gold and rust and blue-grey – in which the girls take on the mantel of grown women, strong and proud in their very different feminine identities, happily dancing in a line, echoing the opening image of the four giving us their schoolgirl dance class routine.
This is an extraordinarily skilled piece of theatre from such a young company. Yes, ThisEgg’s founder/director Josie is the daughter of Hoipolloi’s Dale Shon-Jones and Stefanie Mueller – and Mueller is credited with stage design for the show, so we could argue that not only is theatre in her blood, she has had a strong helping hand too. But that is by-the-by – a case of just making use of what you have available, as anyone would. And no amount of parental support can grant you talent. This show has been created and realised by these four young women, they own it, and it bears the mark not only of their united talents in theatre-making, dance, music and costume design, but also the real-life love for each other that is at the heart of the work.