Author Archives: Geraldine Giddings

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About Geraldine Giddings

Geraldine has been examining theatre and mixed-media performance from the auditorium since childhood, and began reviewing for Total Theatre after completing a mentorship to critique circus performance, in a scheme set up by the Circus Arts Forum. She has been company manager, and worked in production and development at Cirque Bijou, a circus production company, since 2006.

Out of Joint, Ciphers

Out of Joint: Ciphers

Out of Joint, Ciphers

In the first scene of Ciphers a nervous but determined Justine interviews for a job as an intelligence officer. Her interviewer, Sunita, is calm with a touch of dismissive. A large white paper screen passes across the stage in front of the pair, who are seated side-on to the audience across a white table. When it has passed, Sunita is standing up, interrupted, and Justine is wearing a leather jacket and handbag that she didn’t have on a second ago. She’s agitated and as soon as she starts speaking it’s clear that this scene doesn’t follow on from the last. She’s demanding and starts smoking, and though Sunita wants to get rid of her, something holds her back. Something has happened. Justine is dead, and this is her sister Kerry.

In the next scene, Justine is at another job interview, across the same white table, but this time she calls herself Julya, and the interviewer is a whimsical, confident middle-aged man. They speak Russian for some of the interview, and Justine says she grew up in Russia. Translations are projected onto screens at the sides of the stage – in the next scene they become works of art hanging in a gallery where Justine meets an artist, Kai, and his wife, Anoushka, who is played by the same actress, in the same clothes, as Sunita.

Ciphers switches rhythmically from scene to scene, not missing a beat, back and forth through time, adding layers to a suspenseful, tantalising mystery that makes its audience work hard. Throughout, we are required to decipher not only what is going on, but who we are watching, when, and how that relates to what we already know. Sometimes, as in the Julya story, we are not hearing the truth, and this makes it more complicated. We are completely drawn into this web, an active part of a story in which characters blur into one another and time becomes confused. At one point the artist Kai goes to bed with a desperate Justine, and in the middle of the night, grieving Kerry wakes up from the bed, slick with paranoia, leaving Kai asleep alone.

It’s clinically staged, and as precise and smart as a modern TV spy-thriller, though in an after-show discussion director Blanche McIntyre says they had particularly tried to avoid that. There are differences; Ciphers is minimalist, where TV and film revel in the use of technological clutter and large casts to make a work impressive. Here we rarely see more than two people onstage, and the only props are drinking glasses and, once, a small, outdated TV set. The paper screens and table and chairs are expertly moved around the stage – you rarely notice the joins in this high quality production.

Ciphers’ characters are trope-like and deliberately similar to one another, as if it didn’t necessarily matter who was who, at the end of the day. Perhaps it doesn’t, one feels – they are only actors after all. Justine and Kerry regularly analyse their relationship to each other and the ways in which they differ. Kai the artist and a Muslim youth worker, Kareem, are each manipulated by a forceful woman who has something on them. The females are generally dominant, and even when patriarchal Russian boss Koplov seems to get his way by bedding Justine, he has been tricked into thinking she is someone else.

The storyline too, when ironed out and considered, is rather clichéd. The only spy case that we see into that’s separate from Justine’s rise and demise looks at the intimidation of youth worker Kareem, who is forced to spy on a ‘suspected terrorist’ in his community. Justine is not yet trained to properly handle the situation and the youth worker goes missing, suspected dead. Plotlines collide, and in the end the events leading up to and causing Justine’s death are banal to the point of dismissal by her bosses, Sunita and Koplov the Russian. All this adds to the clinical, minimal feeling – we don’t much get a feel for Justine’s anguish and the pressure she’s under, and actually it’s hard to care. What is important to playwright Dawn King is the feeling that the characters are pawns in a system and that their individuality is limited by the society they are part of. What’s impressive is how much we, as an audience, enjoy being made to feel this, and how the show’s almost flawless structure and beautifully clean design and direction are more than enough to keep us enthralled.

Myrtle Theatre Company, Up Down Boy

Myrtle Theatre Company: Up Down Boy

Myrtle Theatre Company, Up Down Boy

Matty’s mother is packing his suitcase for him to leave home. In a room full of cuddly toys in all the colours of the rainbow (plus plenty of neon shades), she counts pairs of trousers, t-shirts, socks, off a checklist. She’s matter-of-fact, impatient, over-brisk and chatty, talking to Matty through the bathroom door. Talking to herself, as Matty’s not answering back.

Matty comes out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another for a cloak, a showercap on his head. He looks like a total superhero, it’s hilarious. Matty’s 19, and leaving home for the first time. He has Down’s Syndrome, and needs to learn to look after himself.

We warm to Matty immediately. He’s playful, imaginative and much gentler than his mother, Odette – subtle and well-timed in his few words and measured gestures. Where she is rushing around, multitasking, scolding, laughing and reminiscing, he is content to stand, unfazed, observing and dreaming. Actors Heather Williams and Nathan Bessell have a great dynamic together, though Williams (also directing) occasionally seems a little nervous or preoccupied tonight, fluffing some lines and slightly off-tempo. The heartfelt script is conversational enough in style that this doesn’t really matter.

Written by Sue Shields, mother of Nathan Bessell (who has Down’s Syndrome himself), it’s a simple and semi-autobiographical story, told largely through Odette’s narrative. It skilfully dots back and forth between the present matter of packing the suitcase, the general situation of Matty’s inability to engage with the task in hand, her worry about his future and how he will respond to college, and the past story of their family life from her wedding day to the present. Shields draws pleasing symmetries between Matty’s imminent immersion in college and certain moments in Odette’s life when she has been in a new and daunting situation – her honeymoon, the family’s move from an English city to rural Wales with four young children, or the day after Matty was born and she was called into the doctor’s office to receive the ‘very bad news’.

Bessell has a wonderful physicality, and with choreography from Michelle Gaskell, moments of dance complement his character and add to the narrative, his dreaming, his getting in his mother’s way, his playfulness. I could watch far more of Matty’s dancing but am content to savour the few high quality moments we are treated to. A further dimension is added to Matty’s character by a series of fun, simple animations projected onto a screen at the back of the room. They represent his imagination; brightly-coloured superheroes and jungle animals are conjured in Matty’s mind from a chance word by Odette, blossoming into full-blown adventures where he is the protagonist, leaving his mother’s quotidian anecdotes far behind. They are also a way for him to make sense of the world – we see each of his four siblings morph into a farm animal when Odette describes their characteristics, and when the pair remember a ‘bad man’ who had behaved aggressively towards Matty in the supermarket, we see ‘Supermum’ on the screen, who boots that bad man out of the picture and rescues Matty.

This is a moving and joyful show that leaves you feeling warmth, respect and admiration for both characters. Their frustration with each other, their deep love for each other, and the strong attachment to each other that is on the brink of being broken as Matty leaves, are tangible and affecting. Bristol-born Myrtle Theatre Company first produced this show in 2009 and are touring it again this autumn in association with Salisbury Playhouse. Do go and see it.

Kindle Theatre, Lady GoGo Goch

Kindle Theatre: Lady GoGo Goch

Kindle Theatre, Lady GoGo Goch

Sam Fox is captivating. Every muscle she moves during this 55 minute performance conveys something to us. She can be intimidating, crazy, cute, curious, and all within 10 seconds, with the flick of a wrist or the sharpening of a stare. She is both pretentious and unpretentious, flouncing about, the only performer on the stage, but generous with her gestures, not afraid to make a fool of herself. She plays a multiplicity of characters, whilst remaining herself, and speaks a hundred stories whilst being really very specific indeed. And mostly in Welsh.

Lady GoGo Goch is a self-professed ‘music-theatre show about Welshness’. It’s far more bizarre and singular than you might think, from that description. Dragons, rugby, the language, mining and Shirley Bassey come into it, yes – and it’s comic, too, at times. But it’s also exotic, mysterious, arresting, and woven with sweet, powerful, rich music.

The startlingly inventive music is created live by Portuguese Ricardo Rocha and Sam Fox, using loop pedal, a panoply of bespoke folk musical instruments, and Fox’s versatile voice. Not exactly the sort of thing you’d want to listen to in the car on the way home from work, it mixes rustic lyre, electric guitar, pieces of slate (ahem, slateophones), with the highest note you can imagine someone singing, sheep-bleating, screaming and very exaggerated welsh phonetics. It’s a fascinating soundtrack, studded with snatches of song that several welsh-accented audience members try and sing along to.

Many a cultural reference passes me by, partly because I’m not always the quickest with cultural references, and partly perhaps because I’m not Welsh. Certainly other audience members occasionally chuckle in recognition at images and lyrics that don’t mean anything to me. I don’t feel destabilised by this because so much of the singing is in Welsh that I quickly become used to not understanding the extent of this performance, comfortable that this is how it is intended, and content to let elements seep in and others drift around me. It’s liberating, actually, and Fox intends it, building up to it carefully.

Beginning with a loop of percussive slate, guitar and sound, in the opening track Fox is dressed in what is presumably a traditional countrywoman’s outfit with a large, Quaker-ish hat. She’s bulky and fabricky and I suspect (rightly) that she has a million other bits of costume on underneath. She’s inscrutable and builds up the track with the oddest sounds, creating all sorts of shapes with her mouth. It is alien-sounding but beautiful, and interesting, as if she’s trying to make every noise possible with the human mouth. As the pair speed up the tempo, I realise that she’s doing Welsh phonetics.

She ends the show standing tall on top of the highest golden heels you can imagine, on top of a chair, on top of a stage. Disco lights and beats surround her. Dressed in a tiny gold dress, with a crown on her head and a homemade harp strapped to her front, she’s some kind of modern hero, accomplished, beautiful, imposing, rousing. It’s an arresting image, as are all her nine ‘Ladies’, each with a particular musical track or theme, certain mannerisms, costume and voice peculiarities. I have no idea who they are, without the programme notes (for which I am grateful), but it doesn’t matter – I am free to appreciate the small details whether or not I can see the whole. This does require a level of open-mindedness, but if you’ve decided as a non-Welsh person to go and see a ‘music-theatre show about Welshness’ in the Bristol Old Vic Ferment programme, then let’s assume you have that.

The show is carefully structured to ensure that the audience don’t get too lost – there’s enough English, comedy and character-changes in there to keep us occupied. It is seamlessly and admirably stage-managed – a musical instrument is detached from the back of a chair, a heartily enjoyed cup of tea hosts a mirror in its saucer for the removal of black facepaint (beard/coal) with a wetwipe (napkin). The timing is consistently perfect and for someone packed into so many items of clothing, Fox cuts a fine figure.

This is a brave and accomplished performance resplendent with the exoticism, mystery, and peculiarity of traditions and culture. Much, much more thought and planning has gone into it than I was able to take away from one viewing, but I found that inspiring, nourishing and exciting.

The Wrong Crowd, HAG

The Wrong Crowd: HAG

The Wrong Crowd, HAG

Balding, and with spines rather than hair; with deep-set glittering eyes and wrinkly, stretched skin covering a huge, flattened, almost alien face; with claw hands, hunched back, scrawny neck, and a hobbling but alarmingly spry gait – the larger-than-life puppet of Baba Yaga is a real treat. Manipulated with gusto and a treacly thick Scots accent by Laura Cairns, she’s the gruesome and malevolent hag-baddy of the traditional European fairytale, but this isn’t a Christmas show and we can’t be sure all will end well…

In a small but ambitious production, The Wrong Crowd (a relatively new company with a focus on storytelling and puppetry) mix traditional fairytale themes and characters with some ideas of their own to tell the story of the child-guzzling and seemingly all-seeing witch Baba Yaga’s brush with one little girl who would not be eaten. She’s Lisa, based largely on Russian fairytale protagonist Vasilisa, but having much in common as well with Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel. We can enjoy looking for moments of the story that we recognise whilst being able to appreciate where The Wrong Crowd have been inventive.

Lisa was brought up on the edge of the forest by two loving parents, but when her mother dies her father plunges into grief and she is left with only an inanimate little doll to protect her. Lisa’s lonely father marries a really disgusting stepmother with two obnoxious daughters. They’re not wicked, per se, they’re just massively irritating caricature bullies, rahs with giant blonde wigs, equally giant sunglasses, and egos to match. They bully her into going alone through the forest to Baba Yaga’s house, where she will almost certainly be eaten by the old witch. Crossing cultural contexts like this worked from an entertainment point of view – the step-family are hilarious – but detracts from the seriousness of the Baba Yaga/Lisa story by relieving the atmosphere after the mother’s tragic death. This is an observation rather than a criticism, as we are kept entranced throughout the show, but I felt that The Wrong Crowd had been building up to something really quite sinister, and that this is deliberately tempered by the introduction of the show’s more modern characters, as if to make sure it is suitable for all ages.

The set is mixed. A jumbled hummock of homely junk fronted by an old armchair cleverly allows outdoor and indoor scenes, transitions and journeys to take place. A roll-along gas fire gives Baba Yaga something to sit in front of, and casts an appropriately gloomy glow, but is a real trip hazard to the energetic cast. The whole set-up is surrounded, as per the tradition of Baba Yaga’s forest house, by a circle of skulls, giving off the intended macabre feel, but half-heartedly, as they are uniform plasticky-looking skulls, like those one might buy around Halloween.

At Baba Yaga’s house, it all gets very grim (and Grimm), with plenty of delightful guts and gore. Lisa is set a series of tasks to complete, which her little puppet-doll helps her to untangle, and to lighten the atmosphere a bit she is harangued by a funny ghost-child who was previously the prey of Baba Yaga. A trip to the afterlife where she seeks her mother is balanced in a similar way by her encounter with the officious gatekeeper, who puts her doll in a ziplock bag for safekeeping. Without this character the afterlife scene, the emotional climax of the show, would have had me in tears – perhaps this is not what The Wrong Crowd wanted.

Lisa earns Baba Yaga’s respect, and in doing so we get the faintest glimpse of the hag’s human side. There are some real depths that could be explored here, but as it is, HAG is a pleasingly ghoulish tale and The Wrong Crowd are thoroughly entertaining.

Angela Clerkin, The Bear | Photo: Sheila Burnett

Angela Clerkin: The Bear

Angela Clerkin, The Bear | Photo: Sheila Burnett

What is curious about The Bear is the way it creeps up on you – how you think it’s about one thing and halfway through you start to realise that it’s really about something else entirely.

The story goes that Angela was a solicitor’s clerk, working on a murder case. On her own one day with the suspect, he tells her that the murder was committed not by him, but by a bear. What follows is the story of Angela’s pursuit of the possibility of a murderous bear.

Based on a short story co-written by Angela Clerkin and Improbable co-founder Lee Simpson, who also directs the show, The Bear begins with Clerkin explaining that she is going to be playing herself, recounting an episode that happened to her a few years ago. It’s a complicated thing, playing yourself playing yourself… and Clerkin seems intentionally stilted and detached, so that from the beginning the verity of the storytelling is in question. The first few scenes of the show intersperse explanation with storytelling and some pastiche ‘noir thriller’ scenes (seedy orange light, cigarette, New Yorkian voiceover) that, though fun, are sketches rather than portraits. All very postmodern.

About halfway through Guy Dartnell, who plays all the other characters in the show and helped devise the piece, performs a New Orleans jazz-style Bear song in an incredibly deep growly voice, and I realise I’ve been completely won over by The Bear, and find myself disconcertingly interested in bear-related facts and statistics.

There is a real ‘bear’ feeling, occasionally – something alive, muscled, musky is lurking in the shadows at the back of this performance. Brown fur works its way into the Rae Smith’s subtle design more and more as the show progresses: Dartnell’s evocative Irish Aunt Gloria in her shabby old fur coat, curtains in a karaoke bar before Angela sings a cabaret song that deals flippantly with domestic murder. When Angela describes having tripped on some gravel after a very drunken row with another potential bear-spotter, and how she catches sight of a flash of fur, hears a deep growl, the tension in the room is palpable.

The murderous bear narrative is flipped on its head at some point along the way, becoming something far more abstract, engaging and raw.  Though it took a while to get going, by the end of The Bear I am nearly in tears. On the way home, a piece of street art depicting a growling bear catches my eye and I double take, realising that I am worried that I too will have to fight a bear, one of these days.