Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Just Like a Woman: Sacred at Chelsea Theatre

Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls. It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. Yes indeedy. Once upon a time The Kink’s Lola was my signature tune when plying my trade as an ‘exotic dancer’. In those days (mid 1970s), I saw myself as a kind of drag artist – playing out feminine mores. After growing up wanting to be a boy, sporting trousers and a short haircut (rare for girls in the 1950s/60s) I’d discovered my femme self, and boy did I want to act it out. It’s a kind of normal thing nowadays, in the queer world anyway, this game-playing, this acting out of any aspect of the (gendered) self and switching of gender allegiances as and when you like, but then less so. Then, you were over here in this camp, or other there in that camp. Radical Lesbian feminists wore dungarees and banned people like me (people who wore dresses and make-up) from meetings. Make your mind up, girl – are you with us or against us? Bisexuality, and what we’d call ‘questioning’ nowadays, were the ultimate sins. Now, thankfully, we are in a time of greater gender fluidity. Enter stage left, ready to explore and celebrate this fluidity, Just Like a Woman – a weekend of performances, screenings, installations, and discussions, curated by the Live Art Development Agency for Sacred 2015 at Chelsea Theatre. We are here to experience women performing women, men performing women, and women performing men. And whatever else might occur.

I manage to see a fair amount of the Saturday programme. Arriving just before 7pm, I catch the tail end of Girls on Film, a screening of performance documentation and performance to-camera, featuring, amongst many others, Cassils (seen at SPILL 2015), CHRISTEENE (shortlisted for a Total Theatre Award a couple of years back), theatre and cabaret star Ursula Martinez, and perennial favourite at Sacred, David Hoyle – who this year is presenting The Pride of Ms David Hoyle (20 & 21 November 2015).

The Girls: Diamonds and Toads. Photo Anthony Hopwood

Before Narcissiter kicks off in the main theatre space, there’s time to take in The Girls: Diamonds and Toads in one of the smaller studios. This is a captivating installation piece – a tableau vivant referencing what the artists call ‘the ill-fated heroines of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen’, although personally I’d see more Perrault than Andersen in the luscious, Rococo imagery. Anyway, let’s not quibble about fairytale references – this is a wonderful piece of living sculpture: two ultra-feminine princesses bedecked in cream and pink taffeta silk dresses, adorned with roses and pearls, lying in state on a bed/table/altar; sleeping beauties frozen in suspended animation, although their eyes follow you around the room as you circle them – big wide eyes with eyelids groaning under the weight of enormous lashes, set in plasticised whiter-than-Snow-White faces, framed by shiny golden curls. One of the two captivates me completely – I can’t break the gaze, locked into relationship. I fight the urge to kiss her and break the spell. Maybe I should have. Instead, I gentle touch her stockinged foot.

Narcissister

Upstairs we go for Narcissister: Conditions of the White Mask, my first experience of this New York legend, an artist of North African and other mixed heritage, whose name and face are kept hidden – Narcissister always performs wearing one (or often, many) of her trademark plastic masks. This turns out to be a wild and wonderful rollercoaster ride of live and filmed performance. Her doll-face masks, combined with her lithe, dance-trained body, give her the appearance of a Barbie doll come to life – an image played out most brilliantly in a performance video Burka Barbie in which the full-size Barbie Girl, in stripper heels and day-glo-pink backless dress, trolls through a trashy 99-cent store, working her way through the plastic-fantastic delights on offer, stopping to lovingly fondle the bubble-wrapped faces of the packaged dressing up dolls, becoming particularly fascinated with one with Arabic packaging. We are then thrown into the world of the dolls, as Burka Barbie comes to life and go-go dances wildly with her dolly mates to The Clash’s Rock the Casbah.

The live action is equally engaging. Narcissister’s entrance is as a kind of animated vanity-table cum dresser scuttling across the stage. The table turns out to be a baby’s basinet. The baby grows into a little girl with plaits, skipping merrily across the stage, then a young woman, a mother with a baby of her own, an older woman, a very old woman, and finally a corpse, back in the basinet-turned-coffin. This delightful, funny, and moving ‘seven ages of woman’ scenario is enacted with astonishing agility and precision, using face-masks, whole-body-mask, puppetesque false heads, and layers and layers of constantly morphing costumes. She twists and turns from one form to another: turning her back to us, she reveals a second mask on the back of her head; now, as she handstands, a further face appears; then, as she walks over from handstand to bridge, another face pops out from between her front-facing legs. It is a truly astonishing performance – rare to see someone with such physical dexterity on the performance art scene; a fabulous amalgam of physical performance and visual art/living sculpture that – although completely different, and very much its own thing – has echoes for me of the work of both La Ribot and Mossoux Bonte .

Harold Offeh. Photo OpenApertureUK

It’s all over far too quickly – but I’m afraid the same can’t be said for Harold Offeh’s Covers, seen next in the downstairs bar. In this piece, the artist restages, live, the images of black divas from the covers of a number of seminal albums from the 1970s and 80s. He stands there in a plain black leotard type garment, striking poses that echo the covers we see displayed on a monitor stage-left, as the music from each album plays. I can’t really work out what is being said here, about gender, about being Black, or about anything else. The divas are female, and this is a male body. And then what? The only one of the tableaux that interests me is his Grace Jones finale, and that because there is (at least) humour in his striptease, his liberal application of baby oil, and his struggling attempts to recreate Jones’s athletic pose on the Island Life cover. Maybe I’m reading this all wrong. Maybe it was all about the failure to live up to the divas, and I just don’t see the intention or intended humour in the other impersonations, I just see someone standing on a stage, vogueing and looking slightly awkward. Who knows? Sometimes you have to admit that you just don’t get something – and this is a case in hand.

LucillePower: The Butch Femme Touch-up Service. Photo Holly Rrevell

LucillePower: The Butch Femme Touch Up Service. Photo Holly Revell

I go off to skulk around the bar, feeling a little tired and wondering whether to call it a night – but I’m then entrapped by three luscious ladies (of various sexes) dressed in vintage underwear (1950s stitched bras and big knickers) and wigs, who drag me over to a barber’s chair in the corner for Lucille Power’s The Butch / Femme Touch Up Service (a piece originally commissioned for Duckie Goes to Gateways, a celebration of the legendary Lesbian club). I’m given a make-up make-over – after some discussion, the beauty salon girls decide against a butch five o’clock shadow (my face must have given away how much I didn’t want this, although I would have quite fancied a moustache), and go instead for full-on femme. Neon orange eye-shadow, lurid peach blusher, and candy pink nail varnish slapped wildly on to nails (and onto a lot of my fingers, too). My black patent boots get a spit and polish, my crotch treated to a liberal dose of Femfresh (in case I should find myself in an intimate situation), and my barnet fluffed up and hair-sprayed. All the while, the girls gyrate and flirt and cosset and massage. Perfect! I did actually enjoy it a lot more than a recent experience of a ‘real’ pampering session in a hotel spa, which I found excruciating. But next time, a moustache perhaps?

Talking of moustaches, I regret missing The Drakes at JLAW on Friday evening, presenting The Butch Monologues, which explores the world of butches, masculine women and trans men. I am, though delighted to have caught at least some of the Gender Spectacle cabaret, which is MC’d by everyone’s favourite butch Peggy Shaw – alongside everyone’s favourite femme Lois Weaver. What a delight it is to see these two together on a stage again – and to know that Sacred is also including a Split Britches Retro(per)spective in its 2015 programme.

Eleanor Fogg’s johnsmith

I didn’t get to see much of the late-running cabaret, but I did at least catch johnsmith (the drag persona of Eleanor Fogg) with what it feels like for a girl, a lovely piece exploring transformation and duality, combining simple, exact, perfectly-controlled physical performance with a great soundtrack, to which s/he lip synchs. What we see is a business man in a suit, at first expressing the minor dissatisfactions and frustrations of the career man. This breaks down into a voice-distorted reflection on male hatred of all things feminine, a fear which disguises a desire to know, just for a minute, what it feels like for a girl. The tie is loosened, the shirt unbuttoned. Sexual politics that in some aspects suggest Jean Genet; sounds that in some ways echo the work of Laurie Anderson. Great stuff! I hope to see more of this artist in the future.

Talking of lip-synching, Dickie Beau’s Blackouts – Twilight of the Idols was shown in the Just Like a Woman weekender, seen by Total Theatre earlier in the Sacred season, and reviewed here. The Friday night also included performance by The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein, Live at World’s End, and the launch of the new book on Lois Weaver’s work, The Only Way Home is Through the Show, which is co-edited by Lois and Jen Harvie, and published by the Live Art Development Agency.

Dickie Beau: Blackouts

Featured image (top) is of Narcissister.

Just Like a Woman was previously presented at Abrons Arts Centre in New York, October 2015, and before that at City of Women festival in Slovenia in 2013.

Details of all works presented in Just Like a Woman, and the rest of the Sacred Season 2015 at Chelsea Theatre, can be found at www.chelseatheatre.org.uk

Just Like a Woman, 13 & 14 November 2015 and a companion weekender at Sacred, Old Dears, 27 & 28 November 2015, are the culminating events in the Live Art Development Agency’s Restock, Rethink, Reflect Three on Live Art and Feminism (2013–2015). See www.thisisliveart.co.uk

Dickie Beau: Blackouts – Twilight of the Idols

Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting! Dickie Beau has a formidable reputation as a cabaret and nouvelle drag artiste, but in recent years has also created full-length theatre works. Blackouts: Twilight of the Idols ‘conjures the spirits of celebrated Hollywood icons’ and ‘channels the ghosts of his childhood idols’ – but that’s not the unexpected element. It’s the form that surprised me.

For the show – or the first half of it, at any rate – is a classic piece of physical/visual/total theatre. Precise physical performance that references traditional mime, evoking the early white-face work of Lindsay Kemp; an interesting casting of objects with dramaturgical significance (an ancient reel-to-reel tape machine; a black shiny rotary-dial telephone) allowed to sit, lit beautifully, on stage for us to relate to as characters in the story; the performance space veiled by a thin gauze on which words and images are projected, creating a multi-layered onstage world.

This first half mostly concerns itself with Marilyn Monroe, and a recording of her last ever interview in spring 1962 – just days before she died – with Richard Meryman for LIFE magazine. But here’s the really exciting twist – included in the show is not only the verbatim recordings of Marilyn’s voice, but also an interview with the interviewer, Meryman, reflecting on the process, on the content of the interview, on the writing and editing decisions (the piece was published as a first-person monologue), and on the star’s death.

We are thus presented with an intricate theatrical web that invites all sorts of reflections on the nature of truth, artifice, disclosure, and exposure. Whose story is this? Is it Marilyn’s, is it Meryman’s, is it the media’s, is it Dickie Beau’s? It’s all of the above. Beau’s relationship to it all is complex and multi-layered, readily mixing fantasy and reality (whatever that might be), deliberately playing on notions of mediation and interpretation. He lip-synchs both Marilyn and Meryman’s words as we stare at the cumbersome tape machine. With Beau as the medium, she tells us she wants to study and be taken seriously; he tells us that he turned up at her Hollywood home without even knowing how to work the machine, and that she was tired and listless and trying to wriggle out of the interview, until a trip to the bathroom for a ‘liver shot’ that revived her miraculously. Mostly, Dickie Beau is in his neutral ‘mime’ outfit, but in one short and beautifully enacted scene, he dons a blonde wig and a white satin dress and stands before us, recreating the iconic Marilyn skirt-blowing moment that we all know and love.

The second half of the show similarly works with the recorded voice of an idol. In this case, it is Judy Garland’s dictaphone notes for a memoir that was never written. This section of the show in fact came first, having evolved from a 10-minute cabaret/short theatre piece that Dickie Beau has performed for a number of years. It’s clever, and ultra camp. ‘Judy’ is dressed head-to-toe in blood red – plaits, a flouncy skirt, striped socks, and ruby red shoes that sparkle and glitter under the lights. Wielding a knife, she’s a kind of hybrid horror-film mix of Dorothy and a reversed-out (red rather than green) Wicked Witch – sitting, standing, tottering on those red shoes as she mutters about looking out for her little girl Liza, and how she hates always playing ‘herself’ – she badly needs time off from being Judy Garland. Lacking the multiplicity of layers of the first half of the show, being a far more direct portrayal of a drag character, this section is entertaining but nothing like as exciting or thought-provoking as the earlier part.

But skill wins out. Despite not being quite as enchanted by the latter part of the show, I’m bowled over by Beau’s skill – his ‘Judy’ is undoubtably a brilliant characterisation. But for me the heart of the work is the Meryman interview, and the way that this is so cleverly unpicked and moulded into Beau’s reflection on his relationship to the Monroe myth. It is interesting to see that Dickie Beau, in his programme notes, dedicates the show to Richard Meryman, who died in February 2015.

Blackouts is not quite the perfect piece of theatre it could have been, but it is a highly commendable show, expertly performed, and a delight to witness.

Karen Finley: Ribbon Gate | Written in Sand

Karen Finley! Karen Finley smeared in chocolate. Karen Finley performing unspeakable practices and unnatural acts live on stage. Karen Finley getting banned – from art galleries, from rock venues, from public toilets. From public toilets – oh yes! I’ve never seen her live, but have admired her from afar for years. Well, I would wouldn’t I? She’s my generation – a child of the 1950s who came of age in the 1970s, embracing punk, porn and performance art with gusto, one of a number of women artists (see also Annie Sprinkle and Penny Arcade and Cosey Fanny Tutti) re-evaluating sex and flying the flag for freedom and liberation and…

And then came AIDS. It started as a rumour, towards the end of the 1970s. There were people on the scene getting sick, getting colds that went to flu and then to pneumonia, knocked over like skittles, blown about like feathers from a discarded boa. Maybe it was something to do with taking poppers or, er… who knew what. The rumours were whispered in the toilets at Danceteria (New York) and Heaven (London) as a new decade came in.

As the 1980s unfolded, we found out what it was – although there was so much fear and prejudice and mistrust it was often hard to get to the facts. People died, lots of people died. People were scared, very scared. Children who had HIV-positive relatives were asked to leave their schools. When Lady Di pointedly took off her gloves on a hospital visit and held the hand of a man with AIDS, it made the front page of the papers – a game-changing moment.

Karen Finley’s installation Ribbon Gate (sited at the Barbican, which is also the venue for her SPILL Festival show, Written in Sand) honours the many deaths from AIDS over the past 30 years, using the idea, popular in South American Catholic churches, of tying a ribbon to a metal gate in commemoration. We are invited to honour the life and mark the death from AIDS of someone we’ve known and loved. I choose Derek Jarman. As I tie my (yellow) ribbon on to the gate, incongruously placed in the middle of a busy and overlit walkway, mayhem erupts all around me. It’s a protest, demanding a living wage for the Barbican cleaners. There is chanting and shouting and banners waived. Ribbon Gate sits stoically in the middle of it all. Derek would have been amused, I think.

I look for an usher to find out what space the show is in. I start to ask the way. Are you going to see Hamlet, the usher asks enthusiastically. No. I find my own way to the Pit.

In Written in Sand, Karen Finley keeps it live, responding to the moment, reflecting on how she’s feeling, asking how we’re doing. She references both the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet happening above us, and the pro-cleaners fair wages protest. In fact, she gets us to applaud the cleaners, and the technicians, and the SPILL Festival producers, and the ushers and….

The atmosphere is relaxed. Less Dead Kennedys than late-night jazz lounge. There’s even a man playing a flute, for goodness sake. So yes, it’s a gig, kind of. A spoken word with music event. Music that is mostly mellow and laid-back. That flute, and piano, and bells, and synthy strings coaxed from a laptop, and gentle percussive backbeats, all conjured up by talented multi-instrumentalist Paul Nebenzahl. We get a mash-up of writings from Finley that include legendary texts like Hello Mother:

‘Hello Mother / Your son is dying. You knew – no, don’t hang up’ and then ‘Hello emergency room / Don’t bother helping someone sick. Don’t bother helping someone dying. He’s / a leper. He’s going to die anyway.’

The music might be mostly mellow, but the vocal delivery is intense and vibrant and shrill and angry, and the words are sharp, thrown like knives out into the auditorium. Time hasn’t healed. Finley tosses her hair and spits her frustration, a fiery ball of passion. Many of the songs/poems/texts (call them what you will) display the frustration and impotence of those left behind. It’s time to honour the dead, to name them. John. Howie. David. Thomas. Her grief is palpable, decades on, as she tells us of phone calls almost-made to dead friends in the middle of the night; of exasperation at the ‘positive attitude’ of a dear friend who is dying; of the sorrow of the woman nursing her dying daughter: ‘No granddaughters for me…’ sighs the mother. This song reminds us that AIDS, like Ebola, like other devastating plagues, is not confined to one demographic. It kills whoever it finds, wherever it finds them. That we lived for decades without prevention or cure, seeing our friends falling and dying in droves, is extraordinary. It was brutal.

In between songs, she sits in an armchair, sideways on to us, the audience, facing Paul Nebenzahl’s piano. She muses on all sorts of things. Freddy Mercury’s tackle. Judy Garland at the London Palladium. Rainbow candles weighing down her luggage. The Crying Game. Boy George. Her Rolodex and all the names and addresses it once contained. Do we remember the Rolodex, she asks. She explains what it is for younger audience members – a kind of Ferris Wheel with little cards attached, is how she puts it. It’s clever, this Rolodex moment, because it shows us what different times the 1980s were. A time when people hid their razors and toothbrushes when you came to visit in case they got – contaminated. A time when hospital workers wouldn’t touch patients with HIV/AIDS without wearing rubber gloves. A time when it was only just about legal to be gay, as long as you didn’t actively promote a gay lifestyle (whatever that might be). But if you were in a long-term relationship and your partner got ill, you had no rights, you wouldn’t be let onto the hospital ward, and when the time came, they’d get sent home not into your arms but to their family of origin to die. To a family that had perhaps previously rejected them, abandoned them. She takes the mic for another classic, He’s Going Home:

‘He’s going home to drapes and homemade wine. To a room of cowboys and / fire engines and twin beds. No one to share your bed ever again.’

Sometimes she sits and listens to Paul Nebenzahl play. All the music used is composed by, or was originally performed by, people who have died of AIDS. He plays a slowed-sown version of the B52’s Rock Lobster, describing it as ‘like an Elizabethan ballad’. Occasionally she starts a song, and gives up, sitting down. ‘I can’t do it right now’ she says. She needs to breathe a bit, to drink some water, to start again. Always the liveness of the moment is acknowledged, and she wants to stay true to how she is feeling and being at this time, in this place. On numerous occasions, she asks for the house lights to be raised, so she can look at us, and talk to people directly. At one point, she invites some of us up to ‘twinkle’ with her, to join her in dancing round the chair and the lines of sand, and the candles.

Whilst ranting against the injustice of these too-early deaths from AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, she also acknowledges what we all know. That we will all be dead one day. Do I die at the end of the movie, she asks. Yes, yes you do. I do. We all do. It’s October 31st – All Hallow’s Eve. It’s a timely reminder of our mortality. We go out into the night.

So what do you think, someone asks out in the lobby. Think? I can’t think. I can just feel. I feel jettisoned back in time, to a time that was harsh and unforgiving and full of angst, yet life-affirming too, full of music and film (Derek!), and performance. We survived. We lived to tell the tale. We rode out Reagan and Thatcher, ridiculed them with street theatre and industrial music and queer cabaret and…

I force myself to think, to be the critic I’m here to be. I’m not that fussed about some of the music, especially disliking synthesised cello. Some of the spaces between songs/poems are a bit long and unfocused. But actually – who cares. Who gives a…

This evening is not about thinking. This evening is about passion, and commemoration. About words that cut through ideas to reach feelings. About remembering, and honouring. About telling stories to those who were there, and to those who weren’t. About never forgetting their names. About lighting the candle, and holding the space. About tying the yellow ribbon around the old oak tree. Or around the metal gate. Lest we forget. Amen.

Ribbon Gate and Written in Sand were presented at the Barbican as part of SPILL Festival 2015. See www.spillfestival.com

MAS Productions: Lady Vendredi – Battle Cry

Voodoo, debauched dancing, white-and-black minstrels, abused crucifixes, popcorn, twerking (culturally appropriated and otherwise), wigs, stilettos (knives and shoes), tits, bums, and a superb jazz drummer. Not your average night at the theatre.

What exactly is it? Is it a gig? Is it performance art? Is it immersive theatre? Yes to all of the above. Merging a launch for a new single by Lady Vendredi and her band The Vendettas (What Time Is It? – available on iTunes now!) with performance work exploring the possibilities of self-exploitation, Battle Cry comes charging into the Roundhouse, guns ablazing, taking no prisoners.

Weaving through and around all this is an exploration of dance and ritual from the Vodou (aka Vodon aka Voodoo) tradition. Glueing it together is the exhilarating free-jazz funky music of three live musicians (playing drums, saxophones/other brass and percussion) and a laptop.

Audience members are free to wander, yet gently manipulated by the performers – encouraged with ease into a circle to witness the mesmeric undulations of the Yanvalou dance that bless the space at the beginning of the evening, or attracted by sound or light over to Pocha Nostra-style ‘stations’ in the corners, on which personal explorations of race, gender, and cultural identity – extreme versions of the self – are enacted.

See here, for example: Mexican performer Ignacio Jarquin, who has transformed himself into a licentious priest or nun, a grotesque transgendered figure in a cassock, lying on his/her back, bare legs akimbo as s/he tries to force her feet into ridiculously high heeled shoes. And there: a devil-girl anointing herself with lipstick, pushing what looks like a Guy Fawkes mannequin around in a trolley; a creature bedecked with a swathe of West African cloth, wearing a Lucha Libre mask; and now Lady Vendredi herself (Nwando Ebizie), pushing the blaxploitation card to the max, shaking her booty in her sequinned bikini, donning her minstrel costume and tap shoes, and inviting audience members to help her white up.

Working well with all the supporting company of three musicians and five performers, with particularly electrically charged duets with Daniel Cunningham – her perfect foil in Eminem-esque backward baseball cap, shades, and white-boy rapper attitude – Lady V brings things to a head with an ecstatic Banda dance, which in the Vodou tradition evokes the disruptive spirits of the dead known as Ghede. The way this manifests is as a wild party dance in which invisible drugs are snorted, smoked and drunk; hilariously over-the-top orgies mimed; and great imaginary feasts gorged upon.

Battle Cry is one stop on a long journey: this particular leg started as a nine-day Secular Ecstatic Art performance laboratory, reported on by Total Theatre here. It is part of an evolving two-year process that will culminate in a show called The Passion of Lady Vendredi at Soho Theatre in spring 2016 (co-produced by MAS Productions and nitroBEAT).

So this is, I suppose we could say, a work-in-progress. There’s a lot of fabulous material on show here – the singing, the music, the vodou dance, many of the performance vignettes – but some things that are puzzling. An over-arching theme of an imaginary neo-feminist cult called M.A.M.A (Mothers Against Male Aggression) goes over my head: that what I’m witnessing tonight is purporting to be set within this cult is something I glean from the programme notes, not the performance itself, although knowing it makes sense in hindsight of some sections of the evening I’m not particularly drawn to, including a rather cringy moment in which men and women who’ve come to the show together are invited to pair up to enact confessions of male abuse. Although there is some take-up, many don’t want to – and same-sex couples and friends, and people who’ve come on their own, stand back bemused.

There are also transitions between musical numbers and performances in which the energy drops – often the times when Nwando takes to the mic to do typical between-song gig chat, which doesn’t work well in this context. It’s one of the few moments where the tug between gig and performance piece produces an uneasy compromise.

But it is early days, with many months to go before the full-length show comes to fruition – and the company and director Jonathan Grieve (formerly of Para Active, this current project in many ways the natural successor to that company’s extraordinary interactive show Zoo-Oids) are to be lauded for their refusal to play safe, constantly trying new material, and growing up in public rather than hiding away in the rehearsal room. This is the sort of work that needs an audience right there, live in the room, to see if things are working.

What I’m sure they’ll take away from this exhilarating and highly succesful showing at the Roundhouse is the knowledge that they have all the core elements in place: a fantastic persona in Lady Vendredi (performed with phenomenal verve and energy by Nwando Ebizie); great music, a truly innovative fusion; a fabulous team of supporting performers and musicians; a way of using the vodou material that works outside of its religious/ritual origins; and the praiseworthy intention of finding interesting, humorous and courageous ways to explore questions of race, gender and cultural identity. Most of all, what’s here is the passion. Everything’s ripe for the taking – go get, Lady Vendredi!

Stacy Makishi: Vesper Time

Stacy is greeting us as we come into the Marlborough Theatre’s cosy, pink, womb-like theatre space. She’s wearing a radio mic, but there’s also (80s pop) music playing, so her words are only just audible, which is rather nice – a kind of murmuring undercurrent. Everyone gets a hug or a smile or a wave or a few words. She’s like an excited puppy greeting her family’s homecoming.

So now we’re all seated and she prevaricates before getting up onto the stage, musing on the separation of performer and audience intrinsic to theatre and performance – no matter how interactive or intimate a piece is, she (the performer) is in one role and we (the audience) is in a different role. This is something important to acknowledge, and I like her for it. It’s hard to get up there, to cross the divide.

Cut! The music stops and she introduces herself and the theme for the night. She’s here because she wants us all – together – to learn that we don’t need to play it small. We can be bigger, better, louder, prouder. She tells us that her estranged father mistakenly called her ‘Tracy’ – and then gets us singing along to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. I’m possibly the only person in the audience who doesn’t know the words, but as we get to sing it five or six times throughout the evening, and as she has a karaoke version on video for us, I get to learn it. We do all learn, together, not to play it small, to give it all you’ve got – and by the time we’re on our last take, the audience is standing and leaping and singing at the top of their voices.

Vesper Time is an odd and interesting mix. Her ‘evening prayer’ is a reflection on ageing, and specifically on doing it and saying it before it’s too late; on male role models and the need for father figures (real or imaginary – gods, heroes, or mere mortals); and on the perils of obsessing on revenge and regret.

She manages, skilfully, with a firm grasp on the dramaturgy, to weave together reflections on Moby Dick, the ultimate exploration of masculinity, peppered with homoerotic desire; stories from her own childhood, marked by the departure of her father and the arrival of her ‘uncle’ Leo; and some deliciously blasphemous fantasies about God the Father. Holding it all together are the constantly recurring threads of the Tracy Chapman sing-a-long, and a stated desire to change her little red slippers into a pair of multi-coloured glittery platforms under her chair. Again and again she tries and stops herself, defeated…

We don’t just get to sing – we also get to greet the person next to us (like you do in church these days) with a great big ‘Aloha – Ai Yai’, and to write down the thing we really need to say to someone before it’s too late – a declaration of love, an apology – these all fed into an American-style mailbox on the side of the stage (Stacy was born in Hawaii but lived her early adulthood in mainland America). Inevitably, we learn of instances in Stacy’s life when she’s left it too late – sometimes just by a whisker, learning of a death just days before of the person she needs to tell ‘ I love you, you were there for me’.

Vesper Time, like previous work by Stacy Makishi, weaves together engaging and warm verbal storytelling informed by her experience in stand-up comedy (with a bit of street preacher thrown in); video clips from TV and movies (Demi Moore! Moby Dick!); and a simple but effective scenography, the white dress complemented by white sheets hung from hooks that reference the sails of a ship. These ‘sails’ are the screen for her film clips. There are choreographic sections that give us sculptural images of birth and death, the hanging cloths becoming a bundled baby, then a shroud, then – as she dons her black-framed glasses over the shroud – an evocation of The Invisible Man (to my eyes anyway – aware that this is a reference that might mean very little to anyone under 40).

She ends – of course! – by donning the platform shoes and revelling in her decision not to play it small – to go for big, tall, brave, wild. The packed house includes a lot of teenage and young adult students, who are all on their feet cheering and whooping. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve seen – ever’ I hear as they exit, smiling and excited.

Vesper Time describes itself as a ‘secular prayer’ and it does feel like a quasi-religious communion has taken place. You leave feeling that you’ve been nurtured and nourished – that you haven’t just witnessed someone else’s story of the fight for liberation and self-expression, but have been made complicit in the united desire for a better world in which we can all grow to our full potential – no rivalry, no competition, just everyone doing their best and being their best version of themselves. Wow! What more is there?