Author Archives: Terry O'Donovan

About Terry O'Donovan

Terry is a performer and director. He is the Co-Artistic Director of Dante or Die and one quarter of new company Toot.

Spitfire Company in association with Damuza Theatre: One Step Before the Fall

One Step Before the Fall arrives at the London Mime Festival glittering with accolades from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It won the Herald Angel Award and was nominated for a Total Theatre Award for Physical/Visual Theatre. Inspired by Mohammad Ali’s battle with Parkinson’s the piece is a dense physical and musical exploration of the triumphs and loss that can result in such an extreme pursuit of pushing the body to its limits.

It’s not hard to see why the assessors handpicked it for the ‘physical’ award. Veronika Kotliková’s central performance is a grueling tour de force. Alone inside a boxing ring, her muscled body ripples as she flings herself across the stage in powerful thrusts and leaps. Most mesmerizing are the opening sequences in which she frantically shakes her limbs or head so fast that the image blurs in front of your eyes. As a symbol for a fraying mind, Kotliková’s frenzied movement achingly conveys the mind slowly breaking down, beautifully embodying a recording of Ali’s speaking which is almost completely incomprehensible.

Whilst it may appear to be a solo show, Once Before the Fall is in fact a duet. Kotliková is joined onstage by Czech Grammy winner Lenka Dusilová who creates a dizzying soundscape that propels, brutalizes and sometimes comforts. Standing behind a MacBook, guitar slung over her shoulder she is an unnerving figure, constantly fiddling with sound levels, fine tuning her vocal and musical loops. During one sequence her voice beautifully layers upon itself, hauntingly and gently growing in delicate sound. Reminiscent of French singer Camille, it’s a highlight of the piece, with both women beautifully but torturously in harmony with each other.

Elsewhere both sound and physicality became too repetitive and angry to clearly propel the action further, instead becoming so ear-splittingly loud it made me wince. Although I’m aware that that is more than likely the desired effect, these prolonged moments distilled the action, often being so intense that the piece became impenetrable.

An interesting addition to the Mime Festival, the performance is not an easy watch, but a powerful exploration of a fascinating and deeply upsetting condition.

Fet a Mà: Cru

A tall, imposing woman in black heels and bright yellow short shorts slinks across a white stage, dragging a chair behind her, whilst a podgy, bearded man eyes her up as he glugs from a green water bottle. As the lights dim she stands poker-straight, eyes piercing the audience, before letting herself drop towards the floor. The man deftly catches her before she swings to the other side. Within moments he is catapulting her taut body up and down, left and right; he balances her on his head and trots around the space as if she is nothing but a hat.

Cru is an incredibly impressive duet between Catalan circus artists Pau Portabella and Marta Torrents. The programme notes that their work includes no special equipment or props. It is significantly richer as a result. What the duo has created is a no-holds-barred barrage of incredibly impressive acro-balance and dance, imbued with a painful narrative that evokes the ways in which couples inflict pain on one another.

There are moments where Torrents is in charge, forcing Portabella to chase after her, exhausting himself whilst trying to please. At other times she switches off completely, it is as if she isn’t there. A beautifully simple sequence sees her in neutral as Portabella gently caresses and coaxes her to touch him. But her arms are limp, flailing to the side as he desperately tries to make her hug him. It’s a devastatingly sad image of a man longing after a lost love. Elsewhere the notion of female as puppet returns as Portabella violently spins Torrents’s body in circles, so much so that you fear she may be propelled straight into the auditorium. He could be a cat playfully ripping apart a bird he’s just attacked. He takes her in his arms and shoves her heels back on before setting her off, doe-limbed into the space. At other points it’s Torrents’s anguish that takes centre stage. There is a stunning solo in which her body convulses across the stage, taking the chair she’s sitting on with her. Her legs kick out impulsively, increasing in speed and ferociousness as her head whips back and forth, a maniacal and deeply unsettling smile plastered all over her face.

The physicality is supremely impressive. Not since Ultima Vez’s Spiegel have I seen such brutal daring with performers’ bodies. The duo are constantly spellbinding and mesmerisingly in tune with each other. Despite the darkness and sadness that permeates the piece, they manage to get us giggling towards the end, their grotesque characters cackling at the themselves – and at us.

Battersea Arts Centre: The Good Neighbour

Following a successful run this time last year, The Good Neighbour returns to take 6 – 11 year olds and their families on an interactive adventure through the beautiful Battersea Arts Centre. We’re ushered into the large Council Chamber as a group of over 100 people, and there meet George Neighbour and his accomplice Monique. George is afraid of heights and of windows and he doesn’t like Christmas, but has no idea why he has these feelings; he doesn’t know why he’s here, has no memories, no life story that he can recall. Divided into small groups, we are matched with a guide (we had a pithy and charming Alexandra Donnachie) and tasked with finding his story.

Creative director Sarah Golding has joined forces with a variety of performance makers and artists to create magical and enchanting close-up performances and atmospheric installations that give us clues to the mystery of George Neighbour’s story. We twist our way up and down staircases and tiptoe in and out of corridors to avoid being heard, before arriving at doors where we knock three times before discovering the treasures on the other side.

Bryony Kimmings’ Kablooey! is a hilarious tale of a woman getting stuck to the wall along with all of the items of her flat. Beautifully designed by David Curtis-Ring and buoyantly performed by Tara Boland, in this piece we learn that laughter is the best medicine. Next we crawl on all fours into Kazuko Hohki’s beehive, in which Hohki tells the simple yet enchanting story of a bee protecting her nest before falling asleep forever. Most captivating is Kirsty Harris & Matthew Blake’s Momentarium: a room filled with glowing jars of water precariously balancing on each other, with drapes flowing endlessly above our heads. Matthew Cusick plays the world’s first ever Momentologist: a man who collects peoples’ memories in these jars. The drapes hold water that house our memories – the water drips gently through the fabric into Cusick’s jars of memories. Picking up one of the jars he holds it above the light and a person’s life is projected onto the drapes, as if shining directly out of the lid. It’s an enchanting image of childhood Christmases, running along beaches, family laughter. What a wonderfully uplifting and thoughtful sentiment to offer The Good Neighbour’s young audience: don’t be afraid to fill your jar with memories upon memories upon memories.

Elsewhere Sheila Ghelani, Abi Conway, Ruth Paton and Golding, with BAC’s senior producer Richard Duffy, offer us other enchanting experiences that are not afraid to steer well clear of traditional festive fare and challenge their audience to think about what is important in life. It’s frustrating that George Neighbour’s story, the frame of the piece, is slightly underwhelming and far less inventive and bewitching than the individual commissions. Nevertheless, it’s an ambitious and thoroughly enjoyable experience that will no doubt delight and excite hundreds of children this festive season.

Nikki Schreiber / fanSHEN: Cheese

Cheese is a rare thing in the theatrical world: a play that genuinely keeps you guessing, amuses throughout, and has an important message burning through its heart. Debut playwright Nikki Schreiber catapults us into a bizarre world where Joe and Freya live in an Emmental house and everyone expects the cheese to be forever plentiful… It’s an allegorical tale that Edward Albee would be proud of – one that unabashedly explores what is important to humans, capitalist society’s grip on us all, and the banking crash, as well as issuing a call to arms to reconsider how much we’ve all played a part in the current mess our economy and ecology has found itself in. Quite a feat!

fanSHEN’s co-directors Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe have set the piece in an anonymous office building on Oxford Street, one of the world’s best known consumer destinations. We’re in the stuffy office of LMC – the London Mortgage Company, which has recently folded. We’re told the power may go out, but they’ll get it back on if so. In fact, the electricity in the space is all powered by cycling in a local gym. It’s a fantastically live way to make an impact and fanSHEN’s risk pays off when the power does cut out. Whilst the cast, in complete darkness, hilariously try to cover up the problem, the conceit perfectly echoes the characters sudden lack of cheese that they’d taken for granted.

The ‘play’ itself is performed by three of LMC’s employees, who have put together a little ‘skit’ played out in front of flimsy divider screens. Jon Foster, Rachel Donovan and Jamie Zubairi have a ball subtly playing up the amateur- theatrical nature of the frame. The team gently lulls us into a false sense of knowing what’s going to happen. Suddenly, as Joe creeps out of his safe Emmental in search of more cheese, the dividers part and another world opens up. Desk lamps hang in space, buzzing and flickering dangerously. Joe is catapulted into a series of situations where he finds himself making some hasty decisions and quietly going along with what’s presented by a series of morally dubious characters, expertly played by Donovan.

It would spoil the surprises to go into details, but Barnard and Briscoe have created a triumphantly theatrical gem. Joshua Pharo’s lighting design is an exemplary use of domestic lights, and the cast uniformly impress as they power towards a dynamic climax. Schreiber’s text could do with a slight edit and is in danger of becoming preachy on occasion, but overall Cheese is a delight from start to finish.

Adura Onashile: HeLa

Two years ago a friend lent me a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It tells the incredible story of Lacks, a woman who has affected all of our lives in some way, without us and, for many years, even her family knowing. Unknown to Lacks, a doctor took a sample of her cells whilst she was having a biopsy (which revealed a fatal cancer). Dubbed HeLa, this specimen multiplied and has since been used to create a cure for polio, experiment with the creation of IVF treatments and AIDS research, experiment with cloning, and countless other monumental scientific achievements.

Inspired by this book, writer and performer Adura Onashile has created an urgent piece that beautifully brings this woman’s tale to theatrical life. Staging the piece in a perfect venue – the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall – Onashile begins as if she is lecturing us. We peer down on her like a specimen as she chalks the names of the scientists who have won Nobel prizes and become very wealthy as a result of their use of HeLa cells. Over sixty minutes that whiz past as if it is half the time, she inhabits the character of Lacks, her daughter Deborah, and the nurse who first sliced that cell, not stopping to think about Lacks as a real woman with a family and a history.

Onashile is utterly compelling; she is raging against the racial, social and financial injustices that have played out over sixty years. Every muscle in her body spasms as she lays on a cold metal bed in a beautifully choreographed repeated movement sequence that invokes the pain inflicted upon Lacks and her family as a result of actions that were completely out of their hands. Crucially, Onashile never shrieks in rage. Instead, her performance brims with an infectious energy that drives the story forward without any wallowing or showiness. It is the best performance I have seen at the festival, filled with humble integrity and utter conviction.

Director Graham Eatough drives the piece forward at breakneck speed. Projections of 1950s hospitals and scientific tables briskly interrupt scenes; Simon Wilkinson’s lighting sharply cuts into the space, flinging Onashile into another chapter of the spiralling tale. The entire performance beautifully echoes the ever multiplying HeLa cells, which also begin to take over the ceiling of the space courtesy of Mettje Hunneman’s delicate video designs.

If you missed the show in Edinburgh make sure to pick up a copy of the book, and hope that Onashile and her team have the opportunity to continue telling this important story beyond the festival.