‘you go and be brilliant for all of us’
This is a round up of some of the theatre I've seen live over the last year or so.
DANCING AT LUGHNASA
Catholic vs. Pagan, Irish tales round the dining table as we transported to 1930’s Donegal. The stage is set up with the kitchen as our focus. The landscape surrounds the house and a winding lane provides the entrance and exit (and dancefloor). One of the best moments in theatre/live performance I’ve ever seen happens in this play as the titled dancing takes place. Wild Celtic women stomp and swirl around the furniture to traditional music, we see the pagan in them and ourselves in full force. They are women who run with the wolves, sometimes. The wireless radio they have recently acquired stops and starts which creates structure in the deliciously rambling conversation. Though the women dance with their freedom, we are often reminded of the constriction of their Catholicism. Starring some of the cast of the super tv show Derry girls, humour is also at the core here. Memory and shadows are used wonderfully here as Michael, the son of one of the sisters, recalls this summer of 1936 as an adult. We do not see him as a child, but hear him narrating his own memories, life lived in our heads. It is a narrative device I love a lot and this fallibility and pause in thought reminds me of a couple of books I read as a teenager, Enduring Love and Engleby, which made me hugely excited by literature.
I genuinely feel at times like I’m sat in multiple kitchens with Irish women I’m related to or have known. This familial weaving will eventually come loose though as ceremony can only last so long. The unmarried sisters, one with a ‘love child’ exist against the structures of Catholic culture. The prodigal uncle Jack with his decades abroad in spiritual communities, unravels it further. The dated and stifling language fired towards difference, echoes the need for escape and the inevitability of drifting families and the euphoria of our first act feels distant. Great, great play and totally absorbing ‘Dancing as if words were no longer necessary’.
ROMEO AND JULIE
Staggered steps on the stage that evoke public spaces, housing constantly reconfigured like the impermanence of working class life, excitement and pride for achievements that will propel Julie out into the world coupled with fear and scarcity. The cruel drunken words of Romeo’s mother tumble too as sacrifice has boiled over into selfishness and the family structure has crumbled. The steps reveal the gaps that ‘bettering’ yourself creates between yourself and those who love you. I think often of how education, particularly in the arts, takes you out of the world you grew up in and precariously places you into worlds you don’t understand. ‘You go and be brilliant for all of us’. You are constantly worried it could shift and disappear much like the set of this play, always on the move. I think when I watch plays or films about working class experiences how do middle class audiences feel? Not in a thought of concern, more curiousity if their chests burn and eyes tear like mine do to see similar lives lived. How do you experience something if you do not see your life in it too? When I watch them it is like I’m seeing my life and the life of so many people I know in front of me, in spaces that haven’t belonged to me. They are ofte stories that honestly can be hard to watch but without doubt deserve to be recorded. We have to remind those who have felt like their world shrinks smaller as fear takes over, that we can go into these spaces and it sometimes it ends up feeling more like home than the ones we grew up in.
STANDING AT THE SKY’S EDGE
Sonder and wonder of the lives crossing over, in the streets in the sky. Richard Hawley soundtracks Chris Bush’s musical singing the tales of the famous Sheffield estate, Park Hill. The central flat is a space of joy, anger, contentment, frustration, love, loss, memory and the eventual gentrification of social housing. The musical is like watching British social documentary photography come to life all at once, it is MAGIC. These domestic constellations of life fill me up, I’ve never seen something that depicts the happy sad angry woeful complexities of the council estate castles that I grew up within. I spent the whole thing swaying, grinning, covered in goosebumps, tearing up and then fucking weeping by the end. Watching it truly made me feel so lucky to be alive and able to witness this masterpiece. “It’s a way of leaving your mark on the world isn’t it?” I heard someone say as I was leaving the theatre and that is power in a sentence.
SUCKER PUNCH
Sucker Punch looks at 1980’s Black British experiences in London. The play written by Roy Williams, is set in a boxing gym with the ring forming a central focus on stage. Before the production begins, a boxer warms up with two tone and reggae soundtracking his movements, character studies before the play. The setting and story takes on life before the dialogue begins, allowing a sense of in medias res to lock us in. The use of sound is fantastic and an instant transportation. Lots of two-tone is used however, it is not a feel good exercise in unity. Language is as vicious and violent as the punches because words become weapons, the racism is explicitly depicted. It is not sugarcoated or presented as if culture and career focus eliminates daily struggle.
Once again, like a lot of the plays/films I’ve been consuming recently, it discusses the gaps that success creates with those you have grown up with. Talent may take you out into worlds you don’t think you would ever get to, but how to deal with the emptiness in knowing you don’t truly belong to any of these spaces? How do any marginalised people, lots of those mentioned in reference to Margaret Thatcher’s path of destruction in the 80’s, find balance between achieving what they deserve and assimilating to those who oppress them? A highly poignant moment comes when Leon’s frustration escalates and he fights himself in the ring, shadow boxing, anger lurching out-a desperation in his voice as his hard work has not taken away his struggles. A really wonderful production!
THE EFFECT
Brain in a bucket, bodies contorting in a white box medical trial from dizzying dopamine highs and romantic love. Mirroring narratives of the lows of mental health in both the experts and the volunteers as love is inextricably linked to mental state and the impossibilities of untangling the two. The four actors hold the stage with sheer power and the instantaneous ability to provoke hilarity and horror in the same breath. Class, race and gender act as triggers for investigating our ability to determine ourselves as ‘sane/insane’ much like the power they hold outside the theatre; science and logic are constantly placed at war with the unexplainable attraction between leads as we examine whether the root of their love matters more than the tenderness of two people. It’s a completely overwhelming watch in the best way!
THE HOUSE OF BERNADA ALBA
Cacophonous gossip and chatter on the day of a funeral, this teal sheer house is on full display with the family and villagers in mourning black for 8 years to come. The walls might be sheer reminiscent of the domestic like Do-Ho Suh’s artworks, but there is no light in the house of Bernarda Alba. Her daughters are caught and coddled and kept in the house as the fear of this family line has built and built. The teal/sea foam colour appears fresh and light but much like the veil of wealth, it is rotting underneath the pleasantries. The compulsion for purity, sterility is stifling and there is no doubt it will end badly, the lamb on the table; the gun on the wall. Mob mentality as the sisters gaggle and gang up on each other, rotating as the hot summer days pass by achingly. The youngest bursts out at her desperation not to rot like her sisters are, with no lives of their own and a battle for marriage as an escape ensues with Pepe. The only suitor we hear of and so he provides the only chance to flee.
The women might be moneyed but the manor alluded to in the set will not give them a way out as they remain tightly wound to their mother and the overbearing crosses on each bedroom wall. Religion, the domestic and Women as a vessel for patriarchal continual control dominate this play and the outbursts feel so real. They are kept in a house like a prisoner, for fear to chime on the hour, every hour. The slight but incessant clanging resonates as you watch and fade in and out; we are trapped under the matriarchal rule too and hopelessness grows like mold, in our lungs and minds. The group of sisters vary in believability and depth but this also feels resonant of a familial structure as characters are given different amounts of space to form full selves, some push for room others linger at the edges hoping quieter affability rewards them somehow. And yet the metronome of personality swings back and those seeming to suck up to their ruler, explode too. These sisters unravel with the housekeepers as confidants and yet enablers, informants. The grandmother floats in and out screeching of imagined lives and desires to marry once more for freedom, a soon to be ghost living to remind the girls of their futures. Her magic realist retellings forebode and forewarn as do the tellings of a storm, of lighting from the housekeepers for when they all look to the ceilings they see death. It is a brilliant play and I can’t wait to read it and fully absorb the writing.