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| Louise Taylor's The Frights |
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| Martin McNamara's Yours Ever Loving |
http://www.smithsmagazine.co.uk/2016/05/12/yours-ever-loving-the-frights-a-review/
Hosted at ‘Theatre N16’ located above the Bedford pub, Yours Ever Loving is performed preceding
The Frights; a poignant and political
duo assembled by the Newcastle based Alphabetti Theatre Company. Martin McNamara’s
Yours Ever Loving trails the trials
and tribulations of wrongly imprisoned 1974 Guildford bomber Paul Hill,
incarcerated through the political conflicts between Britain and Ireland and
only released in 1989. The piece is a whistle-stop tour through the 1970s/80s
with James Elmes embodying the domineering authority as Margaret Thatcher, a
Judge, a Kubrick-esque yob, brutish policeman, Roy Jenkins, Jimmy Saville and a
vicar, all with a startlingly electric delivery. It charts Hill’s fifteen year
prison stint informed through the letters he wrote to his mother during his
time away, intersected with radio broadcasts, news updates and popular hits
humorously relayed by Elmes. Stefan McCusker’s portrayal of Hill is remarkably
human, capturing issues of mental health, repression and the futility of
objecting when within a corrupt and horrifically abusive system.
Physically blindfolded from the offset, Louise Taylor’s The Frights follows. This is a riveting
play that charts the readmission of charity worker Hanny (Christina Berriman
Dawson) into mundane life following her enslavement by elusive foreign forces.
The inconsistency of Hanny’s account of her experience flags fears of deception
and the traumatic repression of the returned captive as she is soon united with
adoring partner Luke (James Hedley), who pines after the memory of the former
Hanny and is obsessively protective. The effect of the performance being
obscured through fabric neatly lends to the prevailing obscuring atmosphere with
jarring flashes of Hanny’s repression that manifest in audibly graphic torture
scenes, sharply contrasting the banality of the doctor’s waiting room. Directed
by the inaugurator of the Alphabetti Theatre Ali Pritchard, The Frights is a sensory and psychological
nightmarish voyage that shakes public perceptions of truth and the distinction
between sugar-coating and fabricating. It fundamentally critiques the nature of
the media platforms from which we receive information, scrutinising public
entitlement to information as well as questioning attitudes to international
charity and domestic hierarchy.
