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.

Geraldine Pilgrim: TOYNBEE

Geraldine Pilgrim has been creating site-responsive performances and installations since long before Punchdrunk ever donned a mask or dreamthinkspeak first re-cast classic text into architectural form. Yet, for contemporary audiences, it’s hard not to encounter her work through the lenses of those other artists who have popularised the form in recent years. Pilgrim’s work rests on the classic tenets of site-specific working: the juxtaposition of crafted image with the unique qualities of a place; the shaping of contextual material – history, memory, cultural resonance – into performative forms.

TOYNBEE feels in many ways like a classic example of the form. The performance is partly an unfolding of the particular history of this progressive institution (Toynbee Hall, first established as a hub for wealthy university students to contextualise their learning within the social realities of the impoverished East End, before evolving into a centre leading many of the key battles fought by the oppressed in the twentieth century). Fragments of this fascinating history haunt the spaces we traverse – from glimpses of nineteenth-century juvenile court, to 1960s shop girls attending evening classes and a lavish Hindu wedding bringing to vivid life the sense of the building’s rich social and political legacies.

The architecture of the space itself provides the overarching theme, as we are guided from floor to floor, sometimes following a reverent Visitor whose intrigued wandering through the spaces gently mirrors our own role in the piece. Key moments in Toynbee Halls’ history are featured, including a fundraising gala in a compact lavish theatre where we shuffle before a frozen audience behind the cast of the Mikado, suspended in a moment.

Yet, though studded with moments of richness there’s a feeling of sparseness about the production for an audience acclimatised to immersive site-responsive performances, interactivity or compelling narratives to pull us through. Spanning both Toynbee Hall and Studios, the show is peopled by students and volunteers from a range of London drama and art schools, a model that maximises scale and effectively mirrors the building’s inclusive history to the show’s form, though with occasional compromise to the quality of the performance, especially challenging in this up-close-and-personal format. TOYNBEE is a co-commission with Spitalfields Winter Music festival, and the moments of live music – including a Victorian piano recital featuring an incredible dress-cum-tablecloth and a dutiful bit of soul singing accompanied by string quartet in a cramped corridor – felt like the fullest expressions of the show’s style.

This is a gentle gift of a site-specific performance, full of information and social histories increasingly relevant in a political environment ever more hostile to left-wing progressive thought. Pilgrim is perhaps a victim of her own success, in that her pioneering work in this form has been taken up and pushed on in new directions by others. The relevance of this show’s ideas feels somewhat masked by its reliance on some over-familiar tropes of a form which has moved on.

Stan’s Cafe: The Anatomy of Melancholy

To translate a 1500 page 17th Century tome on the philosophy and physical manifestations of depression and other mental maladies into engaging theatrical form is a quixotic endeavour, even exhibiting signs of madness itself. Theatrical innovators Stan’s Cafe make no concession to the density or erudition of the original. However, their edit cleverly converts Robert Burton’s monologue into four voices, which, diversely, represent the four humours (a concept crystallised by this text for his contemporaries) or the four ages of man (Gerard Bell makes excellent play of the poor prognosis for those in the 70+ bracket: apparently at least one ancient civilisation used simply to put them down, to put them out of their misery). Thus divided, the text is opened up to barbed asides and playful oneupmanship that allows it to come to life on stage.

In breaking this down, the company understand the usefulness of strong visual aids. From a stage framed as a timeless study – employing both heavy beech writing desks and bottles of lucozade – a series of wooden easels lay out the various chapters and subheadings through which we progress. The quotations which litter Burton’s text are always tagged on A4 credit sheets which are held up by the cast and pile on the desks in reams. The company mine every aspect of theatricality in their source, from simple pictorial and mimed representation of the conditions described to strands of music, dance and a well-placed wig to draw out the lived experiences that underpin their academic text. The cast, who have recently also been touring together in the company’s near-wordless romp The Cardinals, have a fantastic energy together (and in some respect this feels like a companion piece): no eyebrow is left unraised. Their responsiveness to one another is what most brings the material to life – I could spend hours in their dysfunctional company. Kay Wilton’s clever costumes style contemporary fashion into 17th Century shapes – in case you were wondering, a pantaloon-ed and bodice-d tracksuit is a thing of pleasure to behold.

The show is bookended by Bell’s solemn admonitions to the reader, as Burton (or, as framed in the book, a young Democritus) and his is the voice of greatest charm and authority throughout. When he discusses the various ways we need to help ourselves and one another it’s hard not to feel you’re receiving hard-won truths from a wise avuncular figure. And perhaps what is most surprising about this production is the consistent recognisability and relevance of the ideas Burton lays out. In their thoughtful edit of this dense book, the company have drawn out symptoms and advice that feel arrestingly pertinent – not only the importance and challenges of self-care to maintain your mental health and symptoms and definitions that it would be easy to feel belong solely to the modern age, but astute political commentary on such varied topics as the limitations wreaked by poverty (not for Burton our current government’s definitions of the undeserving poor), even a treatise on the powers of sexual healing.

The show succeeds not only in bringing Burton’s idea to life on stage, but in reminding us of the continuity in our connections to the past. Even with a degree in literature this is not a book I would ever have picked up to read in full, and yet I left the performance moved and nourished by the riches it contains.

DudaPaiva Company: Bastard!

Dutch artist Duda Paiva has been creating work that combines his training as a contemporary dancer with puppetry and objects for the past eight years. Bastard! is the company’s international award winning eighth show and is a contemporary visual theatre solo presenting a series of encounters in a giant rubbish tip between a besuited artist (played by Paiva) and the more monstrous parts of himself.

There is a strongly synthetic flavour to the mise en scene – colours in lurid yellows and ambers from the full-height projections that flank two sides of the stage, picking out the brightly coloured plastics that make up much of the vast rubbish tip set. In this plastic world it’s the human, not the rubbery puppets, that seems out of place and the scene is set for some existential anxiety. A thematic sense of mounting chaos permeates the work, from the pleasurably uneven, off-balance bed frame that forms our primary puppet stage to the disordered interruptions in the action which seem to take place inside Paiva’s mind at intervals when he disappears into the tip.

The puppets and puppetry are masterful – nearly man-sized foam creatures with a vibrant spring of life in their long limbs, hooked by Paiva into effortlessly lifelike contortions. In a Beckettian twist the initially comic scenario is peopled by two old crones: the saggy-dugged Clementine (whose diminutive, Cle or ‘clay’ also proposes a Beckettian style of symbolism as a sort of earthy everywoman) and her ‘love’, the desperate ape-like Bastard whose long limbed and childlike cries for help reach out to us. The human scale of these characters and the unignorable demands they put on Pavia’s character – emotional, physical even sexual – empowers them as metaphors to convey wider themes about humanity, kindness and need.

The tale is a dark one and perhaps doesn’t quite maintain a sense of its own limits – there’s one particularly shocking moment that for me isn’t earned and nearly makes me lose faith in the piece. But its heartfelt cries, at times literal, are convincing. This is art that’s deeply felt and it’s hard not to be swept along by its sincerity in attacking big questions. Bastard! is an adaptation of a short story by Boris Vian, which I have not read, but in its profoundly physical and puppet-esque investigation of how we treat our elders, of the value of art and the ways that what we need is often hidden inside ourselves, Paiva has made the story all his own.

Tin Box Theatre Company: Pint Dreams

As I wander down St Stephen Street I hear a guitar and a mouth organ picking out a jaunty tune behind me. ‘Ah, the Fringe!’ I think to myself. ‘Little eruptions of art everywhere.’ But in fact the small caravan of music and audience behind me are the promenade wing of Pint Dreams, a travelling experiment of performance in pubs that has made its way round various cities before winding up in Edinburgh, ending a journey that started over at Waverley in the rather lovely basement Antiquary pub in New Town where the show will take place. It’s an apt framing for a show that seeks to reconnect folkish traditions like storytelling and minstrelsy to the contemporary world of the Fringe.

The set-up is very simple. A small company have taken over a back room of the pub, and against the background hum of bar room chatter welcome us warmly to their little world. Illuminated by fairy lights and accompanied by live guitar, a tabletop puppet emerges from a rucksack to tell a simple tale about a storm, a love affair, and a family estranged. It’s all lightly done. The delivery is intimate, inclusive and direct. The puppetry is clean and makes good use of various levels and performance points offered by a crowd in the round. The story at times could have done with some trimming and clarification – in particular I wasn’t sure about the need for the additional layer of the son leaving home when we already had one errant character in the form of the lover, nor how it all tied back to the Adventuring Day frame.

But this is a sweet and enjoyable way to spend 40 minutes – a show that genuinely manages to combine the vibe of having a drink with your friends with a relaxed piece of storytelling. Fun and free chips! Endearing.

John Luke Roberts: Sock Puppet

It’s a beguilingly silly concept: ‘man is possessed by a haunted sock puppet. Chaos ensues.’ The elegance of the blurb hints at the neat writing to follow. In a tiny room in the Pleasance basement we are confronted with a lamp, a stool and an innocent looking red sock. From these humble beginnings John Luke Roberts masterfully spins a measured and hilarious tale of the unrequited and ultimately homicidal love affair of a failed artist whilst managing at the same time to offer up a lovely puppetry pastiche and a very nicely turned piece of writing.

Any show that incorporates a joke about dramaturgy in its opening sections is likely to take up a warm place in my heart, and as Roberts plays with our dramatic expectations by undercutting a classic ‘rule of three’ comedy horror movie feint it’s clear we are in the hands of a confident and witty writer. The macabre tale is preposterous, hilarious and nicely formed, with just enough of the genuinely unsettling to animate its horror ambitions within a firmly tongue-in-cheek frame. I won’t easily forget his comments about the shadows that live in the corners of skirting boards. The smallness of the space is unforgiving, but the simple puppetry is detailed and well choreographed, helped by some effective voice work that grants the sock a rich Yorkshire tenor (and if that seems a little easy to reach for, Roberts also turns out an all to identfiable Shoreditch art dealer-spic and a fruity academic critic to great effect).

The combination of strong puppetry, writing and deftly confident solo performance makes for a brilliantly comic show, contained in its ambitions but perfectly formed. This is an artist whose work I look forward to seeing much more of.