We are family… Mary’s Babies, Jermyn Street Theatre

“When the facts that you think you know turn out to be lies it’s a little like an earthquake…. These buildings need to be rebuilt from the foundations. Proper facts… Solid enough to build a Life on.”

Maud Dromgoole’s startling new play is inspired by the story of Mary Barton and her husband, Bertold Wiesner who used the latter’s sperm to artificially inseminate up to a thousand women before destroying the evidence.

Now you can only guess at what made the Wiesners want to do such a thing but you imagine the dilution this would have of the concept of son, sibling or indeed father? Dromgoole uses this to hold a mirror to the nature of all kinds of relationships with just two actors, Emma Fielding and Katy Stephens, playing all of the parts. They’re both outstanding as men, women, lovers, sisters, man and wife, ventriloquist, registrar and candlestick maker (probably) and in a bewildering switch from character to character the names are illuminated on the wall behind to help us work out our Greta from our Gertie and our Sarah from our Susan. In all there are 41 parts and it’s a tribute to Emma and Katy that you begin to recognise them one by one, like streetlights, illuminating the narrative.

It’s quite a feat and whilst I’ve seen many a one person show with multiple characters, playing 18 vs 23 takes so much skill and trust; like the two mimes at the end of Antonioni’s Blow Up who play tennis; they both have to keep their eye on the ball. Gradually you become involved in the key relationships as the nature of paternity, “relationship” and being a “sib” of this “father” is uncovered. 

Katy Stephens (Photo Robert Workman)

Normal rules fall away, even our urge to follow the path of parenting is revealed as a choice when the most important thing in all of this is love; the love that never entitled the sneaky sperm donor to claim parenthood for any save his only children with Barton, Ruth and Jonathan.

It’s hard not to feel resentful about a man who placed his own genetic inheritance so highly in other’s lives and who never acted as the third party is presented himself to be. The Wiesner’s practice was based in London and from the late thirties until the sixties they provided artificial insemination services for childless couples and it was only in 2007 when DNA analysis of a sample provided by Jonathan enabled the first people to identify him as their genetic father.

This “Barton Brood” forms the basis of the play as they uncover their relationships years after the “Daddy” destroyed the evidence. Set in 2007 it has characters aged between forty and eighty, a remarkable legacy of deceived humanity gradually discovering the truth and their enduring qualities.

It starts with Kieran, adopted son of Karen who has just died of breast cancer. He now knows that his “cornerstone”, the relationship between his birth mother, Beatrice, and his father, was laid in a west London clinic and not in the bounds of normal intimacy. Beatrice’s husband, Samuel, could not bear the fact of his origins and he was abandoned and brought up by Karen; more his real parent than any of those involved in the biological process.

Emma Fielding (Photo Robert Workman)

Then there’s Bret and Caroline whose halting intercourse is interrupted when she spots that he’s got an extra digit on his right hand… genetics? Gracie and Ethel are a more committed couple but Gracie’s search for her true parentage threatens to undermine their balance… reaching out for more family, Gracie wants considers having her own with Ethel but is she merely compensating; putting some right to her wrong and morphing her relationship into something more normative as a result?

For everyone, the discovery of their empty father unsettles and leads them on to analyse their definition of love.

Kieran meets Rota his half-sister, test-tube removed… while we discover Gracie’s backstory as her father lies seriously ill in hospital with Huntington’s were Caroline (yes, that one… the characters cross over with bewildering ease) works. There’s Bret, who thought he was the son of another one of the Barton’s circle – a surgeon – who has grown up anti-Semitic: he may good genes but that doesn’t guarantee personality and judgment. Sadly for Bret it turns out he’s actually one of Wiesner’s: a Jew.

So it goes, as Dromgoole toys with preconceptions and deftly shifts her narrative through characters without losing pace or tone. With one of life’s greatest certainties – our “Cornerstone” – in doubt we’re left to find new meanings and a new basis for love. The play doesn’t let us down and delivers the satisfying emotional crescendo we need and it’s also very funny throughout.

Credit to Tatty Hennesy’s direction which fully embraces the challenges of the writing, and to the energy of the two leads: they never let up and richly deserved the rapturous applause at the close.

Mary's Babies continues at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 13th April, details on their website.

Ithankyou Rating: **** This is an outstanding play that makes light work of its heart-rending subject matter, it puts so much faith in the audience and we are rewarded with love and light.

Tainted love… Medea Electronica, Pleasance Theatre

"I grieve for the woman I once was, naïve, open-hearted…”

Part gig, part theatre, the electro-musical Greek tragedy we’ve all been waiting for even though we never expected it… Mella Faye blew our socks off and set them alight as we watched in stunned silence. Like so much of London’s “fringe” theatre the Pleasance specialises in surprise and invention unfettered by the same commercial concerns of the West End – not that they don’t need a plentiful paying audience! But it’s the spectacularly unusual shows such as Pecho Mama's Medea Electronica that will ensure that the theatrically-curious will find their way to this superb complex nestled between Camden and Islington.

The play combined the buzz of both – a knowing and expertly-constructed musical populated by the kind of rare grooves you could have heard in the Electric Ballroom or Dingwalls, coupled with the theatrical verve of Upper Street.  Mella Faye’s voice carries a deliciously folky catch in the throat and is like a rougher-edged Liz Fraser, especially with ethereal double-tracking as she emotes over Alex Stanford synths and Sam Cox’s electric percussion. The three are indeed a band, called Pecho Mama, and to prove it they were even selling t-shirts and CDs afterwards.

Their music is so precisely of a period that I’d guess at 1982-85 even though I’d been expecting something a little more 1989, this was a deep groove to explore from an era when synth pop re-invented the torch song with vocalists such as Marc Almond, Alison Moyet and Phil Oakey… full disclosure; I saw Heaven 17 a few weeks ago and they’re still mighty.

Alex Stanford, Mella Faye and Sam Cox - photo Katrina Quinn

This period synth pop reflects the placing of Euripides' 431BC play in Thatcher’s Britain and the greed-is-good mentality of Medea’s husband, Jason East, who seems to have gone off the rails following the death of his father. He spends an increasing amount of time away from home, working long hours and supposedly dealing with his grief.

The family had moved from London to Bedfordshire and Medea has her hands full with their two young children Michael and Peter, especially the former who struggles to adapt to his new school. There’s a lot of love on show and the sound design from Simon Booth is superb as Mella Faye acts to disembodied pre-recorded voices with seamless conviction.

Jason’s true reasons for his absence are soon painfully evident as is his plan to disengage his wife from his life and family… but, this is a play based on a Greek tragedy and his wife, as she warns, will make him wish he’d never met her.

Mella Faye, photo Katrina Quinn

It’s a simple but powerful story that is told boldly and with so much invention, working as an electro-pop-opera with fascinating music as well as drama - a splendid platform for Mella Faye’s singing, acting and mime. It’s a primeval storyline with no modern compromise but, as Faye says, it invites the audience to be on Medea’s side and, despite the things she does, we do indeed want “to will her on, and to want her to succeed.” Is that just the music talking or are we still emotionally “Greek” in response to base betrayal?

Medea Electronica runs at the Pleasance until Sunday 23rd February 2019 before continuing elsewhere in the UK and abroad - full details are on the band/theatre company’s website.

IThankYou Theatre rating: ***** You won’t see anything quite like this all year: dramatically different and you will want to buy the album too!

Distant voices, still lives… Agnes Colander - An Attempt at Life, Jermyn Street Theatre

This is only the second time Harley Granville Barker’s play has been performed with his intention of addressing gender politics, relationships and "The Sex Question", possibly persuading the 20-year old, that it was too frank to go public. Agnes Colander is woman seeking artistic independence but also a “marriage” that will allow her to realise that ambition.  That she keeps on defining these ambitions in the context of a relationship with a man says more about the era in which this play was written than anything else: Agnes cannot operate in society without a man to fund her and, more importantly to give her social standing.

Trevor Nunn will have addressed the question of sex frequently in the 37 Shakespeare plays he has overseen (that's the full set) and here his direction ensures that the play moves purposefully and with convincing performances. But it cannot escape the limits of its original construction, confounding our modern expectations with social compromises that are archaic now. That said, Barker is pushing the boundaries and some scenes are positively shocking for a play written in 1900 and there is a sensibility that would find fuller expression with The Voysey Inheritance (1905), about financial immorality, and Waste (1907). Seemingly he abandoned the play over fears of censorship and audience disapproval and when he re-read it in 1929, he made a note on the manuscript that it was “very poor”.

The only known copy of the play was by Colin Chambers in the British Library, and the American playwright Richard Nelson to revise before Nunn debuted it in Bath last year. It still feels a little uneven but there are some stunning passages that make the jaw drop – Agnes is not just a blue stocking she’s a seeker after truth and self-actualisation many decades before any of that became a woman’s right.

Naomi Frederick - all photographs from Robert Workman

At the start of the play, Agnes played by the magnetic Naomi Frederick, is found in her studio mulling over a work that she swiftly hides and replaces with a blander one when she hears a knock on her door – we don’t see the subject until the last moments of the play but it’s clear from the off that she is creatively frustrated. Her door is opened by the bear-like Danish painter Otto (Matthew Flynn) a curiously abrupt man who is purely dedicated to his art in a way Agnes can only dream of. He has the freedom to be himself – accepted by society even as his outspokenness veers towards cruelty and rudeness.

He has brought news of a telegram from Agnes’ estranged husband who wants her back. He is much older and their union was “arranged” but, stifled, she left to pursue her dream of being “more herself…”. But this dream has not worked, she is reduced to painting within the lines of expectation: producing the merely beautiful without saying anything… She is tempted to give it all up and return to the comforts of the rich man but, decides to follow her heart after Otto “proposes” – in his way, and the two move to France to love and to paint.

This is after a young man, Alexander Flint (Harry Lister Smith), who has been employed by her husband to keep a watch, also declares his love… he’s too young and too late, as Agnes is distracted by the thoughts of the splash of Otto’s paint and the firm line of his charcoal.

Naomi Frederick and Sally Scott- all photographs from Robert Workman

Over in France, the couple have the most artistic of arrangements – Otto does not want to marry and Agnes only wants to paint in the same animalistic way as he. But it’s not that simple and, once again, Agnes finds herself more muse than master. Is she being dominated by Otto and suppressed by his ferocity and simplicity in the same way as, over dinner, he pulls at the bread and mauls the chicken with his bare hands as she politely picks away…?

In the end Agnes must decide to break free on her own or to pin her hopes and talent onto the inconsistent attentions of Otto… cue a rather surprising denouement… ultimately it’s about The Sex Question and the play is rather coy on the answers as it had to be in 1900.

Frederick acts with fluidity and convinces as much as these lines will allow whilst Matthew Flynn gets a lot of the laughs as the freely-expressive Danish draughtsman. There’s good support too from Cindy-Jane Armbruster as Agnes’ long-suffering lady-servants, Lister-Smith as the wholesome Alexander and Sally Scott gives a buzzy cameo as expat Emmeline Majoribanks who is there to remind Agnes of social convention even when she enjoys breaking it by snogging Otto; perhaps “Emmeline” is there to contraindicate the importance of independent spirit?

A tip of the hat to Robert Jones’s stage design which has us right in the heart of things in both London and France; removed in space and time.

Agnes Colander runs at Jermyn Street until 16^th March, tickets and further details all at the box office.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: *** A fascinating adaptation of an important, if unfinished, play that has much to say about “the sex question” from a 1900’s male point of view.

Up Against It… The Ruffian on the Stair (2019), Hope Theatre

“They think because you’re a criminal they can treat you like dirt…”

What is it about the Hope Theatre that guarantees an evening free from thoughts of the dreary daytime, tax returns and conveyancing fees? I think the place is haunted by the punks below and, increasingly by the ghosts of actors above, for I have never seen a bad play here.

Tonight, was yet another delight and Lucy Benjamin was outrageously outstanding as Joyce the reformed sex worker now dedicated to looking after her man. She radiates believability and a powerful emotional coherence throughout, handling Orton’s tricky, multi-levelled dialogue with naturalistic ease even in the midst of a scribbling cauldron of critics and, the potentially distracting presence of the genuinely great Kenneth Cranham.

Mr Cranham was only 18 when Orton cast him as the “ruffian” in the Radio 4 broadcast of the play and, he later also performed it at The Royal Court, he knew the playwright very well having starred in Loot for over 400 times so… a little more pressure on the cast tonight than having just your usual theatrical genius in the room!

To a man, well to a Lucy, Adam and Gary, they met the challenge and produced a perfectly choreographed dance of delusion and despair. Joyce (Lucy) lives with her man Mike (Gary Webster), an ex-boxer full of pride but also deeply troubled by the cards he has been dealt; he works as a hired hand, “fixing” things such as over-due financial transactions and third-party retributions.

Gary Webster amd Lucy Benjamin, photos all from Anthony Orme

He talks of meeting men in Kings Cross toilets and anyone who has read the Orton Diaries can only think of one reason but, as it legally had to be, Orton’s text is never specific, which makes it even funnier… for that brief and brilliant period in the mid-sixties, Joe ran rings around the powers that were, running his words off beneath their belts and over their heads. Orton was even asked to write a film for the Fab Four, Up Against It, which the lads would have loved had it not offered too difficult a sub-text for Brian and EMI.

One day while Mike is out working, a young man Wilson (Adam Buchanan) comes a knocking about a “room for rent” … Joyce is confused as there is no room for rent, but it soon becomes clear that the “ruffian” is a bereaved man who’s brother has recently been killed. Wilson’s appearance is entirely strange, this is An Inspector Calls on Valium washed down with rum and coke… and he asks whether Joyce’s man is the vengeful type and presses her into showing him his revolver.

Paul Clayton directs with an actor's instinct and intimate knowledge of this febrile venue. There’s always more than meets the eye and I love the playful way Orton juggles his narrative mystery knowing, with full confidence, that everything will not only fall into place but make absolute, devastating, sense in the end.

Lucy Benjamin and Adam Buchanan, photo by Anthony Orme

Soon Wilson calls when Mike is home and the real connections begin to be made clearer… In this brief but powerful play, love is stringer than hate and there’s an uncanny beauty in the central premise that is far from laughed away by the play’s hilarious final lines.

We cheered and we whooped, Ken looked happy and the three took prolonged applause.

In truth it’s not fair to single out Lucy alone for Gary Webster is also consummately at ease in this role with his every mannerism giving eloquent voice to his character, a man of pride but also with secret passions and a deep love for the “wife” he relies on so much he has to hide it through insults and everyday nit-picking: his ego is so fragile… what would he be without her?

And then young Adam is superb as the unsettling yet fragile ruffian intent on settling his score but in his own way. If this is a play of domestic invasion, it is also atypical for this lose “genre”: Wilson isn’t there to change their lives but to make sense of his own to pay a tribute beyond their ken… so many layers obscured by off-beat dialogue that moves parallel and at strange angles to the narrative… half a century later Ken’s mate Joe is still startlingly fresh and challenging.

Tickets from the Hope Box Office and you better be QUICK!!

IThankYouTheatre Rating: **** A reminder that the sixties weren’t all flower power but a time of huge social and artistic change; this play still cuts us to the raw and the acting is top notch. What a cast!!

No safety net… No Show, Soho Theatre

Blackpool Tower Circus, aged five, and I was terrified… the magnificent men and women on the flying trapeze were swooping high over our heads and all I could think was that, without a safety net, they could die in front of us.

There’s always been a mortal fascination with circus performance, not just the risks they take but also the amount of their lives they have to devote to moving their art towards the limits of human possibility. I don’t say that lightly and when Kate McWilliam performs 54 cartwheels inside of a minute, she may be 11 off equalling the world record but it’s humbling all the same; how many hours, weeks, years have gone into that amazing minute?

This is circus but it also comes with a story both real and imagined… like a Morecambe and Wise sketch, or Miranda, there’s the artifice of the troop putting on a show but there’s also a deeper narrative, one based on the women’s own career and their treatment.

Kate tells us about her role in a TV show in which she and others trained celebrities to do circus tricks yet, in spite of the fact that she has a degree in the circus arts and is a specialist in some of the most physically challenging of the disciplines, she and other women were often reduced to more decorative displays while the men were allowed to tumble; she takes a glance at the audience and sets of on three perfectly executed tumbles, power and grace combined with acting: these movements carrying disappointment, frustration and an anger that cuts short any frills…

The men would be supportive always telling her she was good but, more often than that, saying that she was good “for a girl”.

Kate McWilliam, Michelle Ross and a flying Francesca Hyde (Photos courtesy of Chris Reynolds)

Such an idea, in close proximity to these immensely accomplished and brave, women, is risible. Camille Toyer is a master of the cyr wheel a heavy metal ring that is some two metres in diameter. Kate narrates as Camille shows what she can do and whilst there’s a joke about the dangers, as they are both “professionals”, the cyr is heavy and can do a lot of damage. Where Camille to lose concentration and allow the wheel to run over her toes they would all break, at the other end the wheel could knock her out or worse whilst, for more difficult motions, it could finish her career as well as taking out the front row of the Soho Theatre.

Yet Camille is literally breath-taking in the wheel, spinning perfect slow circles and then speeding up as she turns 360 degrees first vertically and then, incredibly, almost horizontally.

There’s a running joke about Alice Gilmartin who keeps on trying to introduce the show in the manner of one of Eric and Ernie’s guests, the other’s gently take the mickey but, of course, she has a supernatural flexibility and strength that eventually smacks our gobs.

Her chief tormentors are occasional accordion player, Francesca Hyde and Michelle Ross who’s comic timing and impish grin put me in mind of Alan Cummings (a good thing!). The two have an epic stand-off trying to outlast the other one leg on the ground and the other in the air before they tow produce their party tricks, Michelle taking her though her high-wire act and Francesca spinning furiously supported only by her hair from a rope above the stage.

All have different characters and when they sit down in a line and eat their donuts in silence staring out at the audience it’s hard not to feel intimidated… there’s few people tougher than a circus artist and what are we looking at anyway… pal!?

Kate McWilliam, Michelle Ross, Francesca Hyde Camille Toyer and Alice Gilmartin,

They’re testing us and sustaining a good-natured rapport with the watchers in much the same way as a great stand-up comic – yes, they act but the physical routines are personal statements and they demand our respect. Just as I rooted for those trapeze artists in Blackpool so I felt for the team tonight.

As Ellie Dubois who devised the show says, “we made this show before the #MeToo movement, but the world has been slow to catch up and it feels even more important and relevant than ever.” The moment of pure show-girls has passed and you can’t not look to your own attitudes in watching this “no show”. Whatever the politics, what emerges is a portrait of five hard working and consummately professional women.

No Show runs, jumps, spins and tumbles until Saturday 9th February 2019, there’s nothing like it in 

London right now and I urge you to spin your way as fast as you can to buy a ticket.

Full details on the Soho Theatre website and form the boxoffice.

Ithankyou Theatre rating: **** A perfectly-poignant mix of performance art: philosophical circus that lifts you up and makes you think as you marvel at the potential of applied human dedication. Also, very, very funny too!

The Edge of the World… Outlying Islands, King’s Head Theatre

There’s a lot of cinematic references in David Greig’s extraordinary play, especially from island girl Ellen, who often leaves the island she shares with her uncle and travels the 40 miles across the North Sea to watch films on the mainland. Her favourite is Way out West which she has seen 37 times possibly because of her love for Stan Laurel, but the film I was most minded of is Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937) which dealt with an island very similar to St Kilda which was evacuated in 1930 after local industry gradually died out and there just wasn’t enough population to self-sustain.

Ellen’s island is a lot smaller and, following the death of her father she has no option but to support her Uncle on what he describes as a place with no soul, given over long ago to “paganistic” worship and which he sees only as an opportunity to make money…

I have noticed that something draws us towards outlying islands. Some force pulls… 

So muses Oxford-educated scientist Robert (Tom Machell) who has an almost mystical obsession with outliers and the wild nature they sustain, he is a man who grasps opportunities and is constantly – obsessively – observing, and not just the bird life; Ellen watches him watching her, his dark eyes so fixed she feels as if he grasps her within his hand.

Jack McMillan and Tom Machell (Photos courtesy Timothy Kelly)

Robert is joined by colleague John (Jack McMillan) who is more of a photographer than an observer, cataloguing what he finds with more detachment. The men have been sent to the island to record the wildlife and, especially the rare Leach’s Fork-Tailed Petrel, and they have a month to catalogue the animals “fighting, flighting, feeding…” and their ever burrow.

They arrive to be greeted by old man Kirk (Ken Drury) who shows them to an abandoned chapel, with a broken door that becomes a running joke in a play that mixes humour with a deeper and darker message about humans and nature. Kirk introduces them to his young niece, Ellen (Rose Wardlaw) and both are, naturally, aware of her “presence” with Robert quickly teasing John about his virginity and his expectation that he’ll fail to compete.

Robert follows his instincts and John is forever “hovering” never diving in for the kill or to taste life to the full, always held back by excuses of manners and dignity.

Meanwhile, the men find out from Kirk that The Ministry is planning to use the island to test biological weapons and will reimburse the old man for lost earnings from his Puffin farming and other uses of the land. Without knowing this, the men have been sent to effectively “cost” the project by counting the wildlife that will be killed. Robert is appalled at this potential destruction and starts to restrain the old man, weak of heart and drunk on too much whisky, Kirk has a heart attack and dies… Robert’s fault, perhaps, but not something either man will confess to.

Rose Wardlaw and Ken Drury (Photo courtesy Timothy Kelly)

Ellen mourns her Uncle, but is surprisingly disconnected, she is freed now and this is her island. As the lads move Kirk’s body, intending to bury him after three days of lying in state, she wakes to see them struggling to open the door… at first we think she’s crying but them she bursts out laughing at these two funny men, “Laurel and Laurel” which is high praise.

To cap things off with proper ceremony and in recognition if this pagan church, she sings a pagan song which, it turns out, is “Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” from Way Out West – a great moment with the three voices combining to uncanny effect…

Ellen is unleashed and thereafter the story takes a different tone as the three begin a closer examination of their own natures… free from constraint and still three weeks from the next boat.

Ellen recounts watching one of the men, tumbling down a cliff face, stripping at the water’s edge, “pleasuring himself” and then diving into the waters… she has become the naturalist and is watching them with the same calculation as Robert. The skinny dipper was John but he tortures himself by holding back from making any move with Ellen… it’s a question of nature versus nurture and mannered repression but the outcome is far more complex than that.

We’ve been made film stars by his gull eyes…

David Greig’s play is lyrical, funny and unsettling in a positive way. There are traces of Powell’s later magic-realism as well as everyone from William Golding to Derek Jarman via Samuel Beckett and it doesn’t do predictable. The fact that is based on actual incidents – de-populated islands and government weapons tests – adds a real-world subtext of ecological and scientific abuse. But it’s the mysteries of human sexuality and our refusal to treat ourselves with respect as animals that hit the hardest. We all want the awakening Ellen has… and the freedom of seabirds, forever living in the uncertain moments.

  

Jessica Lazar directs her players to create an atmospheric and moving mystery, and Rose Wardlaw is especially compelling as the closeted lass whose true nature brings surprises and delight as the two men circle, one confused and the other in a rapture of natural abandon. Good job all round!

Outlying Islands plays until Saturday 2nd February and tickets are available from The King's Head Theatre website and box office, it’s another example of the strength of Islington theatre and I recommend it without hesitation.

Ithankyou Rating: **** Great cast and an intriguing journey out to the farthest reaches of ourselves.

Run, run, run… Original Death Rabbit, Jermyn Street Theatre

“I said to my soul, I said to my soul…”

Arthur C Clarke, always ahead of the game, had it that the next stage of human evolution would see some kind of meld between man and machine. The scientist-turned writer conceptualised the idea of communication satellites which have played a huge part in the process but what the clever old stick didn’t quite see was that machines would start to act as an extension of human misery.

Originally broadcast on Radio 4, Rose Heiney’s play is making its stage debut in a time of a world-wide web of social media neurosis; an “…endless demonic mosaic of other people’s stupid bullshit words words words, egos fighting egos like kamikaze pilots in the sky…” The internet has brought knowledge but not so much wisdom and we fall into it like thirsty donkeys at desert watering holes.

But this play is about rabbits, not donkeys, as the lone character, an exceptionally bright Oxford graduate whose name we never learn, has become eternally known as the Original Death Rabbit. ODR is played quite magnificently by Kimberley Nixon who grabbed this one-woman play by its tail and seamlessly inhabited the role, which is, ahem, more than can be said for her shabby rabbit suit. She is funny, heart-rending and devastatingly real deftly mixing in the comedy with desolate sorrow, her eyes welling up with tears that stunned the audience a split second before another perfectly-timed line made us laugh. I can fully understand how Kimberly won her BAFTA and, on this performance, I fully expect that there’ll be more to come.

Kimberley Nixon photo Robert Workman 

The play is about loss, mental illness, and abuse… the woman’s life has stalled after her academic achievement, a first no less and all from a state school, has not enabled her to overcome her father’s violent breakdown when, four days after finishing finals, he cut both their cat’s ear and her hand, pushing it into the cat’s blood before her mother knocked him unconscious with a potato masher.

Her father had undiagnosed schizophrenia and whilst he was sectioned his daughter went into her shell or rather her rabbit onesie. Heiney smartly swerves the serious using ODR’s own denial to bring out the humour and to obscure the full horrors, revealing the actuality of the damage in stages, keeping us laughing with one eye on the emerging tragedy. Kimberley Nixon makes light work of this complex narrative balance as well as single-handedly taking us back and forward into her character’s timeline and browsing history.

The bunny suit had originally been a present from her tutor after she’d written a paper on the awfulness of Playboy bunny girls… she kept it for the novelty value but, after her father’s attack she began to wear it again, inoculating herself with its innocence even as she moped about town and, after hanging around a grave yard, been photographed in the background at a teenager’s funeral. The image was picked up and she went viral… with dozens of youngsters “death rabbiting” all over the country.

Photo Robert Workman

This faddish fame enables her to find an illusory direction in the wastelands of her twenties as she deludes herself that this will form the basis of some monetizable career online… this was in the 2000s before paper dollar content turned into very digital dimes. Living off an inheritance from her aunt, she is able to indulge her fantasy “success” through her twitter feed as Original Death Rabbit as well as a forum dedicated to the proper appreciation of the major works of Richard E Curtis: 4 Weddings, Notting Hill, Love Actually – no comma - and up to About Time. This most certainly does not include The Boat The Rocked – obviously! – and she runs the group with a firm hand.

This side of ODR adds much humour to the plot and even allows her meet up with a potential romantic interest although after he starts quoting lines from Curtis’ films it’s clear he’s even more detached from reality than she is.

This harmless lionisation of an under-appreciated purveyor of middle brow cinematic comfort blankets is balanced by ODR’s darker web activities, notably her trolling of an alternative comedian, @hipsterripstercomedy who both feel make too much out of #mentalhealth on the social network.

As her life gets more difficult – money running out, drink-fuelled denial - the more she falls into a social-media dependency part of which involves her trolling her nemesis in the cruellest of fashions from another account she set up for these anonymous assaults.

Photo Robert Workman

It’s a compelling story arc and a thoroughly disciplined script which crosses back and forth before revealing exactly where our heroine is. Kimberley Nixon is amazing, carrying the weight of the narrative with skill and superb comic timing. She can flip the mood with expert instincts too and controls this one bunny play from start to finish.

Props to Hannah Joss’ expert direction as well as Louie Whitemore’s set and costume design – spot on if I remember the 00s right.

Original Death Rabbit runs until 9^th February and I would recommend it highly – details on the Jermyn Theatre website.

IThankYou Rating: **** You’ll believe a bunny can cry… I predict this one will have a long run!