a co-production with the Orange Tree Theatre
You only find round beds with pink satin sheets in particular places or owned by particular people. But it’s safe to say that a woman wearing a full, fur-suited mouse costume complete with face/head mask is not one of these.
by guest critic Michaela Clement-Hayes
When she first sprang onto the scene with her bunches, we all lost our minds. She was a cool teenager, singing about stuff that we were going through. Or at least we thought we were, but the truth was that we were younger than she was and didn’t really understand it. But we still loved her. And she had morals. Ish.
Harry receives a children’s book manuscript from an unknown writer, Heather Eames. Impressed, he wants to discuss an advance, rights and making her book the Next Big Thing, but Heather’s based outside of London, heavily pregnant and ill. It doesn’t really matter that they can’t meet in person, so they move forward with negotiating. Three books, several films and endless merchandise later, the public are desperate to meet this mysterious author. But she still refuses to meet her publisher or her fans. Harry pushes and pushes until the truth is revealed.
By guest critic Alistair Wilkinson
The fetishism of absorbing someone else’s life and making it your own is the theme explored in Swifties, particularly how to give your world meaning when everything seems so dismal. The play puts in to question why celebrities exist – is it for people like Nina and Yasmin, whose obsession with their idol Taylor Swift has totally taken control over their own identity?
A cultural relic of its time, the bible is hardly pro-women. Lucy McCormick, here incarnated as one of those vapid pop stars who evangelically (and often inappropriately) rallies for the cause they’re currently backing, wants to turn the spotlight on the new testament’s women. She focuses on their underwritten stories, their emotional involvement in Jesus’ life, and all the fingering and angel snogging that was left out of the text we know so well in Western culture.
Trashy, tasteless, obscene, and absolutely excellent, McCormick’s newest show pushes theatre to to limits of acceptability and beyond – any further and it would be pornographic (arguably it already is), though Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat is still not one for those easily offended. Accompanied by two muscly dancers in Calvins, her three-act play that she dutifully explains scene by scene is the story of Jesus Christ. She plays Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ mother Mary, and Jesus himself, with her backing dancers in the supporting roles. It’s also very funny, though laughter swells from amusement as much as it does from discomfort.
This gig-theatre piece is interspersed with appropriate pop songs at key moments of the story, accompanied by excellent dancing and raw emotional outbursts. Her personal life bleeds into the act as she slowly falls apart in the wake of the pressures of celebrity life. Take all of those public celeb breakdowns and multiply them by hundreds with a lot more nudity and mess, and you get something resembling the whirlwind of in-yer-face chaos that is Lucy’s stage persona in this piece.
Her commitment to her cause is unquestionable, but the fact that her character finds the actions that unfold acceptable is disturbing, yet all too familiar. That we can watch someone fall to bits with no dignity and laugh at their plight, righteously judging them, is a powerful comment on the levels of voyeurism and exhibitionism that are now bombard us through all of media’s incarnations.
Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat, for all its deliberate mess and audience discomfort, is a fantastically considered social commentary executed with precision and high levels of consideration and skill. It’s the epitome of fringe shows, and a great one at that.
Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat runs through 28th August.
The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.
I was gutted when I found out Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb aren’t real. The portrait Tim Crouch paints of this fictional couple and their anti-capitalist approach to their art, in striking contrast to a deranged Method actor and her coach making a film about Adler’s life, is so well-formed that they feel that that they can’t not be real. Even though the reality of these characters is so detailed through their dialogue, Crouch’s staging and choreography is wholly unrealistic and often absurd, a work of art in itself. This rigid stylisation, though eventually giving way, rebels against convention just as the characters do. These two sets of characters and the staging battle for dominance in a wonderfully compelling and disturbing commentary on the ownership, commodification and nature of art and its creators.
A nameless student begins with a lecture, and intersperses scenes with a discourse on Janet Adler’s life and work, shaping and contextualising the woman that actor Louise discusses with zealous devotion. Despite these strong feelings, Louise is unmoving, staring straight ahead. Her teacher Sam is the same; though their voices have some emotion, their bodies are rigid as they stare through they audience. Adler’s widow, Margaret, assumes the same style when she first appears. A boy moves any necessary props, wearing wireless headphones with instructions whispered to him by a woman sitting upstage with a microphone. Some of the props are appropriate to the action, some totally absurd. The boy’s innocence and movement is powerfully accentuated amongst the stillness; though he is a child, he has control of all physical action rather than the adults. The sculptural staging with juxtaposed power becomes a thoughtful commentary on art’s relationship with its audience, something Adler may have approved of.
Though the performances aren’t wooden in the least, the distance they maintain through roughly half of the play is frustrating, albeit canny. It works as a concept within a play about art and the detailed characters are built through dialogue, but the initial lack of connection between them leaves a gaping void.
Cath Whitefield endows Louise with a fanatical “I will stop at nothing” attitude that’s both satisfying to look down on and be disturbed by. Her and Sam’s visit to the house where Adler and Gibb last lived and their subsequent choices are a potent critique of the Method acting technique, as well as any other justification of awful behaviour for the sake of making art. Her character’s abrasiveness effectively generates empathy for Adler’s widow Margaret, ferociously played by Gina Moxley, who also shows moving tenderness when faced with the memories of her partner.
The richness of the characters and the feeling that they live beyond this play is the strength of Crouch’s writing, but the messages contained therein are important to consider. Who does art belong to once it’s in front of an audience? Where are the boundaries of an homage to the dead? Who do any resulting accolades belong to? It’s certainly thought-provoking stuff to consider the lineage of the cultural products we consume. Despite all the good intentions in the world, what damage may have been caused in the research and making of that book/film/play/artwork/song that we consume so casually?
Adler & Gibb runs through 27th August.
The Play’s the Thing UK is committed to covering fringe and progressive theatre in London and beyond. It is run entirely voluntarily and needs regular support to ensure its survival. For more information and to help The Play’s the Thing UK provide coverage of the theatre that needs reviews the most, visit its patreon.
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