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Fringe 2010 Reviews (39)
Others
Paper Birds
Pleasance Courtyard.
****
Leeds-based devising company Paper Birds have more brilliance in their collective little finger than a lot of companies do in their entire body, so to speak. This is the sixth new work that they have shown at the Fringe, the most recent previous shows being 40 Feathered Winks and In A Thousand Pieces, and they show no signs of running out of inspiration. Their remit is to devise experimental yet accessible performances which represent female experience in some way. With Others they’ve given themselves the widest possible brief – to explore how women are seen in the world today.
Of course the show can’t actually definitively answer such a question; it’s probably unanswerable. But what it does do is explore the notion of how we judge women we don’t know, the prejudices society encourages; and its conclusion leans much more towards arguing for the fundamental unknowability of strangers, than to a facile assumption of unity, togetherness and similarity between all women. This is brave and intriguing. Mostly though, their approach is just so very offbeat and funny.
They start the show with an unidentified noise played over the stage, which the three performers (Jemma McDonnell, Kylie Walsh and Maryam Hamidi) quickly decide is a woman. They then quickly start to make various assumptions about this woman, based on the noises they think they’re hearing her make, leading them to conclude she’s some sort of celebrity witch. At another point the cast gather around a TV screen, look at images of female celebrities, and recreate exactly the kind of conversation women have as they flick through Heat: “Keira Knightley’s lips are too pouty”, “yeah but she’s done well for herself hasn’t she”, etc.
McDonnell and Walsh also bounce off each other to fabricate the story of an oppressed Iranian woman, with Hamidi acting out their ideas as they come to them. It’s a witty run-down of every Iranian cliché in the book – she lives in a village, keeps animals, draws water from the well, is beaten by her husband – as well as ticking off every stereotypical characteristic of womanhood – she raises her children, she tends to her man, she’s caring and sympathetic, part of the community of village women. Hamidi gets increasingly frustrated as she dashes about enacting every cliché, while at the same time questioning them – “where would my husband get alcohol from?”, “why would I have to go to the well, they have taps in Iran, there’s a utilities infrastructure!”.
The more serious side of it is that the company genuinely did exchange letters with an Iranian woman, Nasim, to find out more about what her life is like, how she sees herself and how she is seen by others. Nasim’s responses are obviously much more true to life, and the play then interestingly explores how Maryam sees her: initially assuming that she knows all about her, but gradually realising that just because they’re both of Iranian heritage doesn’t mean they automatically know the details of each other’s experiences. Maryam has rather been projecting her own experiences onto Nasim.
The company also read out verbatim some of the letters they received from Sally, a young Northern woman who corresponded with them from prison. They share the role of Sally, putting on a slightly comical Northern accent; but in the end it’s very affecting, to watch them try to get to know this woman. At one stage we watch them crowding around Sally, physically closing in on her, as they try to get out of her what it was she did to be in prison – as though they’re desperate to form a definitive judgement of her, and they can’t do that based simply on their interactions with her, they have to know the cold facts of her case. And there’s a clever moment near the end where McDonell gives a monologue as Sally, only to have the pianist at the edge of the stage repeatedly chiming in with sad background music, however much she tells him to stop. The music tells us what we ought to feel about Sally; in a way it victimises her. The point of the show is that we should resist from making such easy, preordained judgements.
And then there’s the Heather Mills bit. Continuing to riff on the theme of the demonisation of celebrity women, the company wheel the TV screen into the middle of the stage, and screen an interview that Heather did on one of the morning chat shows. It’s on mute, and the three performers sit watching all her hand gestures and facial expressions and recreating them, as they frantically improvise pretend answers that they imagine her giving to their questions. Then they restage the actual interview, each flipping between playing Heather and playing one of the interviewers; they quote her own words and mimic all her gestures as she complains about how the press have hounded and misrepresented her. It’s not that the show is necessarily taking Heather’s side and criticising the world’s treatment of her. It indulges in a few of its own slight digs at her, after all, such as when she casually mentions that amid her charity work she did Dancing With The Stars. It’s just saying, we don’t know this woman. She is different in everyone’s eyes.
The music, from pianist Shane Durrant, forms a nice undercurrent to the action, and there are also a couple of nice metatheatrical moments where the music and the stage action clash with each other. The set is simple, with a couple of moveable panels that can become the walls of a living room or an interrogation window in a moment. And the performances are hugely engaging. The beauty of the play is that it never imposes its arguments on the audience, it simply lets them take what they would like to from the show. It tries to set an example in this respect I think.
Corinne Salisbury
Impossible Things Before Breakfast: This is Water
By Linda McLean
Traverse 2.
****
The third Impossible Thing Before Breakfast is somewhat different. Drawing on her experience as writer in residence at the Orchard Project in New York during June and July 2010, Linda McLean has created a verbatim play based on short extracts of interviews with dozens of individuals.
This thought provoking piece takes as its primary theme uncertainty and faith, in the widest sense of the latter word. This is then elaborated out into allied subjects such as fear and death.
The interviewees seem to be a good cross section of society and between them run the gamut of views and emotions. Together, their opinions allow listeners to make informed responses to their own similar experiences and possibly, to look at life in a different way.
This is perhaps best encapsulated by the words of a man in his sixties who finds himself at a crossroads where he needs to guess at life expectancy. This in turn will motivate his activities - rush to experience everything that will complete his being in the next few weeks or pace the pleasures over decades.
Director Stewart Laing works well with his four actors, Meg Fraser, James Anthony Pearson, Nalini Chetty and Gary Lewis to change a wordy 35 minutes into something pretty special and receives help from a team of four cameramen. Their ostensible purpose may have been to contribute to the video of the project but in passing, the quartet added an extra dimension to the performance.
Philip Fisher
Harlekin
Derevo
Pleasance Courtyard.
****
It’s good to see Derevo back at the Fringe again, they have been sorely missed and this year they present Harlekin and it is a sheer delight. It is a powerful heartbreaking love story with Anton Adasinsky searching for love from his Pieretta (Elena Yarovaya). He will do anything to capture her heart including becoming her shower, her towel and indeed her entire bathroom, but his love is not reciprocated.
Eventually he makes the supreme sacrifice and offers her quite literally his heart which she devours and the production takes a much darker, sinister exploration of relationships. The poignant relationship between the performing monkey and Harlekin is most moving. Adasinsky is simply an outstanding artist, a true craftsman of his art and a joy to watch. The powerful musical score adds a potent dimension to the piece.
There are moments of surreal magic in this wonderful physical show with performances that both amuse and enthral, the sheer ingenuity and physicality is breathtaking.
If you have never seen a Devero production I urge you to go; if you are a fan you will most certainly not be disappointed. Bravo.
Robin Strapp
Of People and Not Things
By Andrew Hungerford
Distance Over Time Theatre
The Vault.
****
The breaking up of a love affair isn’t easy to make into a new and thrilling piece of Fringe theatre, but that’s just what Distance Over Time Theatre have accomplished here. Presented as a lecture to people living in some form of post-apocalyptic world, the story of Thomas and his break-up with a girl he’d loved for several years, is a new and different take on the concept of examining heartache.
Thomas is the bookish and learned scientist, making his presentation on the spot having gotten drunk and not finished much of it. During the course of which we are given snippets of his relationship with a young woman and his desperate attempts to understand what happened and why it ended. The beauty of the piece is while there are definite allusions to some sort of unmentioned disaster, it’s never clear whether or not this apocalypse is real or merely an allegory. Which is also why the second half of the piece is equally brilliant as a surprise turn begins to show us the other side of the situation.
The overall performance is one which will stick with the audience and give them a lot to ponder over. Acted well and performed with humour and depth of emotion it falters only at the beginning and the mid-point where the lack of clarity is confusing and distracting. Otherwise this is a fine production, well worth experiencing.
Graeme Strachan
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