Daffodils (A Play With Songs)

Rochelle Wright
Bullt Heart Club
Traverse Theatre

Todd Emerson and Colleen Davis Credit: Sally Jubb

Daffodils offers a fusion of bittersweet story-telling and rock 'n' roll played live by a trio on stage.

The performance is presented as the history of keyboardist Stephanie Brown’s parents and starts in 1964 when Rose (then 16) and Eric (18) meet in unlikely circumstances amongst the Daffodils of Hamilton East in New Zealand.

For the next 70 minutes, their lives are played out in speech and song. True love burgeons from the start and survives separation as Eric takes the compulsory world tour. However, he even cuts that short to propose marriage, followed by a wedding complete with embarrassing speech from the groom’s father, Barry.

He, it transpires, is the fly in the ointment. Not only does Barry ask Eric to cover for congenital philandering but, by dying inappropriately, has much longer-term consequences.

Some of the plotting is a little contrived but the use of the trio’s music works perfectly and viewers will really care about this couple, played with feeling by Colleen Davis and Todd Emerson, each of whom has a good singing voice to enhance a moving experience.

Reviewer: Philip Fisher

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