Yours Ever Loving/The Frights: Review

Louise Taylor's The Frights

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.

Boy: A Review

Leo Butler’s Boy is a work that speaks candidly of issues surrounding the contemporary urban condition, through the eyes of 17 year old drop-out Liam; an anxious adolescent, Liam struggles to communicate with figures of authority and is fundamentally isolated. Performed on a perpetually moving figure-of-eight conveyor belt at Islington’s Almeida, the play seamlessly moves between gravity-defying commuters, doctor’s offices, street corners, bus shelters and job centres.

This is a jarringly honest portrayal of London consumerism and its effect on social divisions. Whilst undeniably humorous in parts, a sad stagnation is reflected in Liam’s walking against the movement of the conveyor belt. Liam’s destructive inclinations and vain attempts to mark his name with his finger on the glass of a bus shelter seem to pronounce his own struggle of finding a place in a city of conflicts. The anti-climactic odyssey to Sports Direct to track down former school mates results in further aimless wandering and police encounters. Crucially phone-less in an environment wholly driven by technology, Liam is pushed further into the fringes of society. 

Homelessness is present throughout the play and juxtaposes the stark social divides synopsised in the absurd pantomime of the Underground. Raising issues of rising youth unemployment, the social implications of the ‘fit to work’ bill, nationwide library closures, zero hour contracts, binge drinking and immigration it is a deeply political piece which Butler first drafted in 2011 and chimes with the times. It speaks of a city in internal conflict. Stand-out performances include Frankie Fox in his stage debut as Liam, as well as another debut from Bayleigh Gray as Liam’s sister, Mysha.

A powerful comment on city-living and social inequality, Boy places the spotlight on the seclusion of individuals in an urban environment.

Leo Butler’s Boy is currently at the Almeida theatre running from the 5^th April to 28^th May.

http://www.smithsmagazine.co.uk/2016/04/18/boy-a-review/