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.

Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe: I Wish I Was Lonely

This collaboration between Mancunian writer, director, and performer Chris Thorpe and poet and performer Hannah Jane Walker follows up their nationally touring hit The Oh F-ck Moment (2011/12), and once again casts identifiable experience through verbal and theatrical dexterity to re-mould our perspective on everyday life. The impossibility of loneliness, when contact is only ever a thumb press away, and the resultant shifts in our experience of intimacy is the show’s heartfelt thesis. But it’s much more fun than the psychology essay it could have been instead!

We are all invited to leave our phones on. The pair create a warm atmosphere which can just about contain the anxiety triggered by the possibility of having to answer it in front of a room of 30 people. The presence of the handsets – in our pockets, on the floor, thrumming with potential – is almost a smoking gun. It binds us together as the willing lab rats in this experiment.

As we sit in clusters, in pairs, in a circle, Thorpe and Walker gradually deconstruct the weird filter to experience that mobile technology has evolved. The writing blends conversational direct address with gentle philosophical questionings, always ready to reach for the sucker punch example in comic or tragic form. More phrased, ‘poetic’ sequences lend gravity to the plight described. Is this our contemporary tragedy: condemned to proximity without closeness, more alone than ever, even as we over-share? Of course this is an old argument, the fear of technology as master rather than servant of our desires. And while the medium is never less than compelling, the message didn’t always convince.

In this deceptively simple, sincere show, there’s a sense of having mined the theatrical possibilities of working with this idea, creating a wealth of material, connected but not always relating. When we interact by phone message does it demonstrate alienation or intimacy, as we catapult ourselves into a stranger’s palm? As our Chinese whispers spread round the circle, the unusual thrill of an immediate connection feels just as much in evidence as the distortion that occurs when messages are shared. But at its heart this show is a plea for connection – that most theatrical of notions – and even in a noisy back room in BAC it succeeds in truly drawing us together and acknowledging one another in a way that feels rare and compelling. Its lovingly crafted stories, examples, and observations remind us that despite the convenience and prevalence of this technology we have a choice of model. And in my book, a little bit of resistance can never be a bad thing.

bread&circuses: Wot? No Fish!!

The collaboration between writer/performer Danny Braveman and director Nick Philippou has been thirty years in the making. For much of that time Braveman has been working in community contexts including London Bubble and Theatre Royal Stratford East whilst Philippou has been honing his skills at Actors Touring Company and the RSC amongst others. The influence of both strands of their work can be felt in this heartfelt performance which embraces its audience in an intimate conversational form that belies its careful crafting. It’s a piece that reflects the commitment of both artists to the radical, illustrating in action how politics are writ large through the personal. It’s also a moving family saga which carefully invites us in to the private minutiae of a fifty-year marriage, to comment on history, identity, and family.

The underpinning conceit is of a legacy box left to Braverman from his great-uncle, in which are discovered a lifetime’s worth of wage envelopes illustrated in pen and ink. Commenting on the everyday (and sometimes not so everyday) events of his uncle’s marriage and family life, the sketches bring to life the hidden worlds of our private lives while spanning a fascinating period of history in the depression of the 30s and the onset of World War Two. Braverman is also interested in illuminating a Jewish experience in London, peppering his stories with Hebrew phrases and insights, which seem to warmly invite us more deeply into his family’s perspective, as well as emphasising the place of this single family’s account in a wider experience.

Simply staged, with a plain white illuminated table projected via live feed camera to a large upstage screen, the procession of tiny drawings through time structures the storytelling, bringing out a poignant sense of life’s shortness and the curious impact affected by legacy objects. But don’t be fooled by Braverman’s gentle delivery, and the friendly conversational style. This is a show that packs an emotional punch and is filled with political and historical insight, making a powerful, fitting tribute to the humble cobbler whose lifelong passion for drawing forms its heart.

Bristol Old Vic & Handspring Theatre Company: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Text and puppetry are different languages. Puppetry speaks through image, movement, and rhythm. Text deals in abstraction – ideas – and specificity, of voice, expression, and thought. Text is of our world, shaping our everyday experience continuously, whilst puppetry retains an otherworldliness which is sometimes part of its appeal. For these reasons puppetry adaptations of classic texts are a complicated business, albeit one in which collaborating company Handspring (renowned in the UK for their work on Warhorse) have made a name for themselves in their native South Africa for tackling, with puppetry productions of Faust and Woyceck, amongst others.

In this co-production with Bristol Old Vic which first opened in Spring 2013, the puppetry, though seeded throughout, largely relates to the play’s text as an expression of magic and otherworldliness. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play sprinkled with fairy dust throughout and this production has the tools to realise this fully. Titania’s fairy retinue are an unsettling hotchpotch of sideshow homunculi steeped deep in the uncanny valley, or sometimes simply a collection of animated planks, used to create movement on stage and weird shapes round the roughly-hewn face of their queen. The fairy king is, likewise, a giant carved face, used expressively as a handheld mask above the head alongside a single giant puppet hand, whose clever articulation is sometimes overused in the production’s reiterated metaphors of the gods’ control and influence over its mortal characters. In the scenes between the lovers, puppetry persists through the endearing presence of an object-animation Puck, the most characterful of all the puppets (though the decision to have him voiced by three actors can sometimes make his transformation hard to follow), but largely, there’s a sense in this version of the production of ‘them and us’.

The human interactions, especially between the lovers and a hilarious collection of rude mechanicals clearly having a ball on stage, zing along, supported by some beautifully choreographed slapstick (the movement, by Mimefest favourite Andrew Dawson, is excellent throughout) and fluid scene changes. Yet the larger scale sequences of puppetry can feel hit and miss – the ensemble work animating planks is not always clean or focussed enough. It isn’t surprising to see from the programme that most performers here were new to puppetry.

This is one of the funniest Midsummer Night’s Dreams I have seen, hugely enjoyable, and packed with invention but there’s often a sense of gear change between the human and puppetry scenes that seems to undermine its larger ambitions.

Because this is show that wants to make a point about puppetry. The programme speaks about placing the story in a future post-technological society, where puppets and votive figures have assumed new resonance. The classic doubling of Hippolyta and Titania is given a new edge as the bride-to-be consciously assumes the goddess mask she’s has been carving and there’s a masque scene which makes quite explicit the central metaphor of supernatural control over human relationship that the production wishes to assert. Yet, over-ambition is a generous flaw in theatre and in this production, with its rich images, detailed performances and plethora of visual theatre languages, there’s much to inspire theatre makers and audiences alike.

Waving, Not Drowning

Beccy Smith explores mime as contemporary performance in the work of Gecko.

In 2002 I stumbled into a Pay What You Can performance at BAC by a company I’d never heard of whose show had been picked up for a longer run after being spotted in a North London pub theatre. This early performance of Gecko’s first show, Taylor’s Dummies, is one of the few theatre experiences imprinted with vivid clarity, more than ten years on. I can remember just where in the studio I was sitting. The bravura opening sequence with a game of ‘tag’ played out between three identically dressed male performers and a handful of shop window dummies slipping in and out of animation. The electric blend of acrobatic dance and silent movie star panache, with gig-like stylings through smoke and side lights, scored by the driving patter from a live drum kit and peppered with surreal imagery (A shapely woman’s leg emerging from a table! A tiny lounge-singing puppet baby!). The production, which returned to BAC in 2003 before embarking on a national and international tour, was a breath of fresh air: physical theatre vivified by a brilliantly chosen score, experimental total theatre that played intriguingly with narrative and character in an unabashedly epic style. Although bearing hallmarks from the backgrounds of company founders Amit Lahav and Al Nedjari – with the David Glass Ensemble, Ken Campbell and De La Guarda – the work was different, more filmic and mood driven, and yet physically highly specific in character and imagery. I revelled in it, and wondered what it was.

Ten years on and the company continues to innovate. Now led solo by Lahav, its stated ambition ‘to arrest our audience’s imagination, awaken their senses and fill them with energy and vitality’ has deepened and developed through five shows. Gradually, the company’s scale and range have grown. They are one of the success stories in British cultural exports. Their unique language, largely wordless, effortlessly crosses borders. Their exploration of the possibilities of dynamic theatre in movement easily assimilates some of the exciting theatrical trends of recent years: puppetry, circus and digital imagery. It’s still compelling and intriguing to watch but now I have a language for the form the company are playing with. And it’s a form currently enjoying its ‘annual revue’ across London: mime.

The genre of mime is often greeted with suspicion by British audiences, distracted by visions of sub-standard street statues or the enforced jollity of childhood charades. Each year, London International Mime Festival does much to bust popularly held myths about the genre, showcasing the diversity of its contemporary incarnations in performances driven by physicality, rich visuals, and the comedy and empathy that can be conveyed by figures in motion. This year Missing, Gecko’s newest production, is one of two shows by British companies in the Festival, following a smash hit Edinburgh run. Considering Gecko’s work through this framing helps to draw together the seemingly diverse strands and languages of their work.

The company themselves describe the foundation of their practice as ‘movement’ and this often leads critics and audiences to discuss it in terms of dance. Yet the particular codification of the everyday which makes Gecko’s work so identifiable, its emphasis on the presentation of character through recognisable emotional states, speaks with the specificity of mime, not the abstractions of dance. In their second show, The Race (2003–2007) character conflict rests on the tension between the overwhelming demands of the everyday and our need, and simultaneous incapacity, for transcendent moments (embodied here as the arrival of a first child), for a sense of progress ironically obscured by the quotidian ‘race’ for survival. The need to connect, to live fully, is a recurrent metaphor which relates to the movement languages used by Gecko to embody their ideas. Everyday movements, crafted but immediately identifiable, crack open and flower with emotion, inflecting their rhythm and dynamic. Their grounding in reality forges a connection to our contemporary world and provides a strong base from which to reach toward the shows’ more metaphysical themes – of a mystical self realisation or breaking free from restrictive patterns. In Missing, a woman is metaphorically absent: the actions of her working day – meetings, conflicts, negotiations, drinks, dancing – are carefully drawn in choral composites that whirl into life across the stage’s travelators and screens. A recognisable relationship, lapsing into security and acting as a canvas on which deeper insecurities can finally be drawn, is expressed through a series of physical duets developing through intimately familiar sequences of gesture. Our protagonist yearns for a sense of completion, to better understand the conflicting impulses affecting her, and these deeply felt concerns are grounded in movement languages drawn immediately from life.

The definition of mime, which Lecoq worked so hard to rehabilitate, is that of imitating the reality of the world. The worldiness of Gecko’s subjects – from men’s insecurity, to navigating life’s big events and the psychological malaises of modern living – are well served by a language that is also drawn from the world. The underlying dynamics within and between characters and the rhythms of the environments we live in are conveyed into movement. This can propose rich metaphors, like the entrenched boxing and wrestling between characters representative of Palestine and Israel in The Arab and the Jew (2008), or the walls of a vast interconnected bureaucracy breathing in The Overcoat (2009). The readiness with which Gecko’s work can cross over into some of the traditional lexicons of mime – the world of the silent movie for example, which forms the primary style and language of their loose adapation of The Overcoat – attests to its essential presence in their work.

Lecoq was also instrumental in reuniting the methodological connection between mime and clown. Clown is central to forms of presentation of Gecko’s characters – performances refer and relate to us directly. Key characters – from the three men in the throes of diverse stylings of existential anguish and glorious meltdown in Taylor’s Dummies to Lahav’s mysterious svengali character who seems destined to help the protagonist in Missing – perform to us knowingly: our presence heightens their own.

Mime re-presents the world we know through movement and in doing so offers exhilarating opportunities for theatrical fireworks in performance and rich metaphorical languages that can feed every element of a piece of total theatre. Mime is also a form preoccupied with outward presentation – it’s all show no tell, after all – and this is sometimes reflected in the dramatugy in Missing, which is rich in emotional depth but somehow content-lite. The mythical outlines of the stories don’t quite hold up to scrutiny; the emotional lines a little obscured by the inclusion of sequences (especially those from the protagonist’s past) which seem to owe their inclusion in the show to theatrical flair rather than storytelling necessity. It is though, the richly poetic theatricality which ultimately carries the production, as it swings from one moment of sublime visual lyricism (Chris Swain’s incredibly inventive lighting design deserves special mention here) to another. All the exhilaration of Gecko’s work is still there: the engine of bodies in motion and the irrepressible desire to convey feeling through rhythm and gesture drive the show relentlessly onward, and the company to continue to invent.

London International Mime Festival is a key event in the UK’s contemporary theatre calendar for the innovation and breadth of performance languages on offer from around the world. Triumphantly flying the flag for the UK, Missing is one of the clearest illustrations of mime’s contemporary power and relevance.

Gecko’s current production, Missing, plays 31 January–2 February as part of London International Mime Festival. Their new show The Institute opens in the UK in April 2014.

Città di Ebla: The Dead

The act of remembering can be overwhelming, often not so much done by us as to us; triggered by a chance glimpse, the seemingly familiar. In Joyce’s novella, published as part of Dubliners, memory conveys potency, the remembered figure of a dead ex-lover holding a power over the present that those simply existing within it can’t hope to compete with. This sense of overwhelm is at the heart of Città di Ebla’s powerfully visual production, expressed through large-scale, hyper-real imagery on a large downstage screen though which all the live action is viewed, and in the unsettlingly warped and electronically styled everyday sounds that rise to unnerving crescendos. Also by some startling theatrical moments (which I won’t spoil here) that vividly articulate the feeling that memory hovers at the margins of your senses, ready to ambush you.

Italian company Città di Ebla are interested in working from literary form, having previously devised from Kafka’s Metamorphoses. As the lights dim, the opening image seems to transform the dominant screen into the texture of paper, from which, slowly, images of a half-seen female form coalesce, like photos developing or ideas slowly forming themselves through Joyce’s layered prose. The sound of miserly rain falls on every side. We could almost be in Dublin. From here on in though, the relationship with the source material becomes rather more relaxed: theme and form seem of most interest to the company. Photography – taken live on stage by company founder Claudio Angelini, with selected images projected almost immediately to the screen – is the central metaphor, and it’s an eminently thoughtful dramaturgical choice, literally foregrounding a sense of the present’s messy fleetingness compared to posterity’s clearly drawn lines. The large scale, close-up images that blossom as our protagonist (company founder Valentina Bravetti) explores a deserted room effectively capture the sense of powerful snapshots of memory arising. However, their connection to the action isn’t sufficiently clear in the first half of the piece to capitalise on this clever mechanism. Despite the programme’s protestations to the contrary, the scene of apparently frenetic action played out to us only through photographs sent out from ‘backstage’ does come across like a slideshow, and it’s hard to hold on to a sense of the live event occurring on the other side of the blacked out screen. Also, it’s an odd experience to watch a live performance where the still images are more compelling, and deliberately so, than the moving body on stage.

As the story unfolds, we slip between past and present to illustrate the haunting power exerted by memories of the dead young man. From behind the screen we witness hauntingly intimate images from our protagonist’s memory, but strangely, it’s her who is being remembered. The relentless focus on Bravetti as subject, in various states of undress – writhing on a bed, even stripping for the camera – feels unjustified. Even when the stage pictures created by the meeting of gauzy live action, light, and projected image are ravishingly beautiful, the focus slides away from the power of remembering into a sort of imagistic homage to the rememberer and her physical form. Perhaps we are meant to be viewing Bravetti’s figure through the unseen eyes of her husband from Joyce’s source, tortured by his own awareness of her remembering? But what comes across is simply a sense of amplified voyeurism, which, strangely, is one of the few mechanisms that is no function of memory at all.