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.

SynaesTheatre: The Girl and The Goat

The Girl and The Goat is the first production by new devised physical theatre company SynaesTheatre. They tackle an ambitiously earthy tale – a young woman’s conflict between her passionate affair with the god Pan (the eponymous goat) and the more conventional expectations of her family. It’s set in a loosely medieval frame and the lighting and stage design are strong, succeeding in creating real atmosphere – the dappling light of a forest across three woven wicker screens. Costumes are also well realised: the cloven slippers and woolly-trousered goat especially effective.

The physicality is highly committed on the hard-to-work raised stage of the Warren’s main space, combining detailed mime with ensemble work, though it sometimes feels rather literal in its construction. The company haven’t quite, though, found the theatrical language to fully explore their story. There is careful, sometimes deft, choreography, but all too often speech, when it is used, feels clunky, leaden with exposition. The story is highly sexually charged and the company haven’t yet found the expressive forms to present it as a more digestible and creative metaphor. Sometimes it feels like mime is being used simply to replace speech and this makes the world feel oddly stilted.

There is much commitment here and the company certainly have performance skills and some strong ideas about the forms they want to explore. But there is still some growing to do in terms of creating a rounded performance, one that combines both light and shade, speech and movement, to fully satisfy an audience.

Lost Dog & Lucy Kirkwood: Like Rabbits

Lost Dog’s dance theatre went global in 2011 with their Place Prize-winning It Needs Horses, which has toured extensively since. Lucy Kirkwood’s Olivier award for Chimerica earlier this year has cemented her reputation as one of the foremost British playwrights of her generation. Like Rabbits, the world-premiering collaboration between them, holds the promise of combining Ben Duke’s emotionally immediate choreography with Kirkwood’s panache with ideas and is a red hot ticket. This combination of movement and new writing is a challenge many artists have grappled with, raising issues of hierarchies of meaning and the interaction between registers of communication – detail, abstraction, the play of interior worlds and exterior expression – but it’s hard to imagine two artists of the moment more suited to the task.

It’s a short, dense piece, adapting the Virginia Woolf short story Lappin and Lapinova about a couple who develop a fantasy relationship as a rabbit king and queen, escaping the strictures of Edwardian polite society. Eventually the practical demands of being a part of the world overcome the alternative reality of their relationship, with the husband dealing the final blow, leaving his young wife trembling at the stultifying prospects of their future.

Duke and Kirkwood have transposed the story to the present day – we open in a night club with an all too familiar scene of a young man nervously failing to chat up to the cooly smoking object of his desires. He dances his chat up and there are some great comic moments in these early scenes: by shifting the action to the more permissive contemporary world, the latent sexuality and role-play of the set up come to the fore. Holly Waddington and Susanna Peretz’s second skin rabbit costume designs are tactile and charged: putting them on does indeed make each character strange.

The use of language is spare and simple – anyone hoping for chapter and verse (by either Kirkwood or Woolf) will be disappointed – almost all the detail and lyricism is transposed into movement. This makes for a highly compressed choreography: we observe the relationship through series of music-driven scenes, each a single carefully selected song from a highly eclectic score. So the music is as much part of the language of the whole as the movement, with only the occasional misstep in the play of meaning, in Ino Riga’s early solo to Mary & the Boy’s Fuck Me, where movement and song seem merely to be repeating one another. The dances are playful, sensuous and highly identifiable, the clear emotional and imagistic line of the story gives us plenty of points of entry to read on stage, though the density of the interaction is sometimes too rich to fully digest at one sitting.

It is a thing of beauty to look at. The design plays with dualisms, black and white, light and shade, magnifying the gendered contrasts of the Edwardian world of the original story. The bare white stage and two simple stools recall the circus ring of It Needs Horses, placing this work in conversation with the last. Designer Jackie Shemesh’s lighting design creates stunning stage images – pools of light that separate and touch; dancing shadows that multiply the bodies, their couplings and their conflicts on stage.

Words, when spoken, are effective. They express ideas – such as the glorious banality of a perfectly selected shopping list as a metaphor for the oppressive ordinariness seeping into the relationship – that could not be communicated physically (though in this case, the same core idea is later reiterated very effectively in the closing image). There’s a real sense of the working of the material to identify in each moment the most effective form for its expression and it’s great to see such literary material effectively translated into physical form.

However, by re-contextualising the story, some of its shape is flattened out: in replacing the social pressures affecting the story’s female protagonist, voiceless in a masculine society, with the emotional pressures of maintaining intimacy, playfulness and sex in a modern long term relationship, the material loses some of its bite and feels a little more obvious. There’s less sense of progression, which means the shape can sometimes feel repetitive and the male character’s motivation more arbitrary in this version: why wouldn’t he be just as invested in retaining those qualities in his relationship? Despite this caveat, Like Rabbits is a rich and engaging production packed with interesting decisions about conveying experience through movement, images, music and words. It builds on the audience friendliness of It Needs Horses whilst offering highly appetising food for thought about the ongoing possibilities of dance theatre.

Sleepdogs: The Bullet and the Bass Trombone

The Bullet and the Bass Trombone is a show about a haunting. A composer stands at the centre of an empty semicircle of music stands. As his story unfolds – and it’s one whose motives and actions feel all too plausible, of postcolonial resentment, civil unrest and murderous realpolitiks – they start to feel like a circle of gravestones. The image is an effective one: without performers or scores (gently stripped by the composer from the stands in the opening sequence) music stands are poignantly redundant, rather undecorative and laced with symbolism, the absence they represent palpable. The stagecraft in evidence in even these opening moments sets the bar high – this image, the simple, powerful actions, and a hugely evocative musical refrain of a whistling bird, whose uncanny calls resemble a neighbour’s cheerful tune, echoing in a distant rainforest.

Bristol-based two man band Sleepdogs experiment at the edges of theatre, live art and sound work, and it’s no surprise that several of their productions have been adapted for radio. Here they have created a satisfying story to frame a form where sound is the principle actor. A haunted composer (joint company director Timothy X Atack) relays past events that placed the orchestra in peril and for which he feels responsible, having written the music that took them abroad. His medium is various recordings: moments salvaged from damaged mobile phones, and interviews with a couple of the main players after the events. It’s an elegant development of a classic storytelling mode, allowing his voice to work in counterpoint with the recordings as he also mixes soundscapes live from a kitted up sound desk centre stage. Standing where the conductor would have been, this is now his orchestra.

It’s powerful set up and there are scenes (or rather ‘sounds’) of affecting beauty: the bravura sequence of the trumpeter’s tale, trapped alone in a hotel with only her trumpet as a revolution rages around her, rising to a throbbing crescendo soundtrack that mirrors her immersion in the music in which she hides. This section however, like several others, falters for being overlong: the production is perhaps measuring itself by musical rather than dramatic rhythms and this means that the storytelling repeatedly stalls just as it should be revving up.

This is a show with much to say: there is some fascinating commentary in the piece about the ways we use music in our lives, as well as a detailed and utterly believable political narrative, with relevance to too many contemporary conflicts in post-colonial countries around the globe. Atack’s monologues are stuffed with an anguished degree of detail reliving the fear and suffering of his musicians, each lovingly named and remembered in a list like a litany. A rich texture of words and sounds are created, vividly conjuring the contemporary mediated world of distant conflict. But there are missteps too: a narrative twist in the closing sections is a real mistake, threatening to undermine our sympathy for both story and teller and leaving us feeling rather manipulated. There are times when I wonder why director / producer Tanujah Amarasuriya presents this as a live performance, when so much is prerecorded and produced before reaching our ears. The silence and emptiness of that strong stage image seems to offer an answer, but in the closing moments of the play this meaning is discarded, leaving me feeling unsatisfied.

Fire Exit / David Leddy: Long Live the Little Knife

I’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.

Barely Human Puppets: Beowulf

Beowulf is the first full length production by Barely Human Puppets, who have made a name for themselves in Brighton for their quirky short shows and beautifully crafted puppets by artistic director Daisy Jordan. It’s an ambitious text to tackle, embedded in Anglo-Saxon artistic convention, not to mention written in an Old English language that is now an alien tongue. Yet there are opportunities too: this dense storytelling language is designed to be spoken, with much to offer the fearless performer; and the poem’s otherworldly theme – of powerfully strange invading monsters – lends itself in a very immediate way to the powerful strangeness of puppetry.

The company have approached these challenges with some bold choices. Writer Craig Jordan-Baker works through a clear interpretation in his adaptation, framing Grendel and his mother as the enemies of a fledgling society represented by books and stories, whilst at the same time casting the hero, Beowulf, as a callow youth whose enthusiastic naiveté for ‘his own legend’ critiques the warrior template and perhaps more generally, the egocentricism of this emerging human culture. Our ambivalence toward Beowulf is magnified by the company’s portrayal of Grendel’s incursions as cultural and psychological – his sack of the hall is represented by a tearing up of books, and in this version he criticises more often than slays. Here Grendel is a symbol of the simple completeness of the animal, ‘born already his complete self’, in contrast to Beowulf’s internal conflicts. There’s a sense in the text’s dramaturgy, though latent at the moment in this production, that this idea could go further and connect to the relationship between puppets and people on stage too.

I’m not enough of a scholar of Old English to comment on the validity of this reading of the text – it certainly places its ideas in a more contemporary framework of our troubled relationship with the messy, unruly natural world. Where the production does run into problems though is in some of its theatrical choices. There’s a real variability in performance styles and quality amongst the cast of four female puppeteers whose presence is all-too accented by the Dukebox’s small stage. It isn’t clear why the company have chosen to work with visible puppeteers, who determinedly ‘invisible’ themselves throughout – there is no eye contact or interchange with the Poet-narrator character or with one another, placing their performances in an uncanny no-man’s-land, both highly present and unacknowledged. There is more to be explored about the puppeteers’ relationship to the story, the audience, the Poet, and one another. The puppetry also needs much more work to sharpen the details of the visual storytelling, and take it beyond rhythmic gesticulating to the Poet’s words (it seems a missed opportunity not have the puppeteers speak their own characters’ lines) and deeper into presentation of Jordan-Baker’s intriguing characters through their own rhythm and breath.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of theatrical deftness. The company throw everything they’ve got into transforming this pub back room into a den of wonder. Jordan’s puppets, particularly the monsters, are visually surprising, muscular tabletops well constructed to convey immediate power and weird mobility. Musician Paul Mosley, in the corner, bristles with instruments from horn to glockenspiel wielded like his own private armoury to animate the diverse atmospheres and characters of the story. His detailed underscoring through this varied instrumentation adds real richness and works in effective counterpoint with Tom Dussek’s mellifluous Poet narrator. The visual storytelling can be inventive, especially some lovely work with shadow play and props. Many of the core ingredients are there – but the company need to work through their theatrical language and choices to move this interesting production to the next level, beyond a storytelling presentation with puppeteers into the theatrical adventure it can be.