Mobile

Devised by The Paper Birds
The Paper Birds
Latitude Festival

Mobile begins as a casual chat outside a caravan as the host of her tiny audience tries to guess our names and our jobs, then she invites us into her caravan.

In fact, it is not hers but her mother's, where she is staying temporarily while she finds a place of her own, but it is filled with memories of her own life, especially her childhood. She tells us she is there after a break-up with a partner she has lived with since university, but her big struggle is over class, returning to a past from which she believed she had escaped, but guilty about considering it to be an escape from her working class routes.

Much of this is told to us as though we are visitors to her temporary home, but occasionally we are taken on little fantasies: there are audio accounts of other people who have escaped a childhood of struggle and poverty; the windows are screens that appear to make it rain and take us on a journey to her childhood home; the TV shows clips that are directly relevant to her struggle.

It's a fascinating 45-minute journey that throws up issues that many of us have had to confront or will do in the future, but it doesn't offer any answers. It's also performed extremely well by Kylie Walsh, tightly directed by Jemma McDonnell and has some stunning technical effects by The Media Workshop that are tightly integrated into the storytelling and never gratuitous.

It's pretty much booked up at Latitude, but if you can catch it on tour next year, it's well worth a look.

Reviewer: David Chadderton

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