Author: Philippa

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: Richard lll, A One Person Show

Emily Carding’s a charming and charismatic loon, wielding all the weapons in the narcissistic coercive controller’s armoury

Adapted from Shakespeare’s Richard III by Emily Carding and Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir
Directed by Kolbrun Bjort Sigfusdottir
 
Sweet Venues’ brand new venue, the tiny and intimate Yellow Book.
 
Come into my parlour said the spider to the fly, and in we willingly go, our smiling tactile host gently gathering us in, seating, casting and labelling us ready for disposal.
 
As Richard, Emily Carding’s a charming and charismatic loon, wielding all the weapons in the narcissistic coercive controller’s armoury. Love-bombing Lady Anne, grooming and sending out the flying monkeys to spread the rumours and do the dirty work, touches of poor-me DARVO and gaslighting – it was all laid out here, centuries ago.
 
The words are Shakepeare’s, weaving the essential moments together, Carding slipping into assured asides, responding and reacting to the audience in the moment, and it’s fitting how grimly funny it often is.
 
The simple modern dress, the red slash of a tie, the tight black suit for always painful and rigidly controlled movement, is a subtle representation of Richard’s cheated of feature, deformed, unfinish’d condition, a mobile a messenger for incoming news and a means of issuing orders.
 
This Richard has a little list, and we’re all on it. We’re mesmerised, the huge eyes and the voice a persuasive weapon, a ‘trust in me’ croon, soft and seductive, until of COURSE this is how it’s going to be and we’re all complicit in the sophisticated carnage.
 
The bottled spider pounces and instead of a cocoon we have a new label. Dead.
 
In the face of such reasonable, hypnotic tenderness, you’ll find yourself doing as the king bids you on this climb up to the crown, as the mood swoops from crowing elation to horror and stricken despair to the inevitable crash.
 
It’s a must-see must-do experience.
 
Philippa Hammond May 2024

Sussex Playwrights Reviews: The Tower

In a future where climate change has caused catastrophic flooding, pockets of humanity survive huddled together for refuge

By Emma Kelly
Directed by Debbie Fitzgerald
Choreography Charlie Hendren
Projections A/B Smith, aka Boblete
Wild Elk Productions
 
In a future where climate change has caused catastrophic flooding, pockets of humanity survive huddled together for refuge.
 
A trio of actor dancers tell this tale of four generations of women, at its heart Toni, a young girl born after it all happened and at first uncomprehending as to why a mother would want to create new life into this disaster.
 
Isabella McCarthy Sommerville is physical, emotional and resolute, flowing through the adored child clinging to all she’s ever known, the adolescent justifiably angry at everything, until as in all the best hero’s journeys she has no choice, she must move on. The young woman striking out alone, the growing adapting woman, the mother, the elder having to move on again in this fluent world.
 
Sarah Widdas is mother’s love personified, always there, supporting, pushing, advising, Toni’s light in the dark. There’s a dreadful memory of assault defeated performed with visceral power, and the sense that as long as she’s needed, she’s there.
 
Lorraine Yu gives strength and resolve, the abandoned child creating a flawed new world from nothing with all the weight of a community on her shoulders, singing and playing (is it a fishing rod? Bow and arrows? No – an intriguing one string instrument) gradually coming out of her spiky armour plating to reach out and learn.
 
It’s a story of all our lives and a possible future, and for anyone who’s ever let themselves say goodbye, the final moments are very moving.
 
Simply staged with lights, soundscape and watery projections, in a venue drenched with sea history, the show could travel all round the coast to communities where the water is an ever present element of their livelihoods, and perhaps now a new threat?
 
A last thought … The Day of the Triffids begins with strange lights in the sky and the appearance of mysterious plants. As I left the Old Net Loft, Brighton Fishing Museum venue, stepping straight onto the seafront looking at the dark sea and the lights of the wind farm on the horizon under a strange green sky that was the beginning of the Aurora Borealis night, I thought about the QR code that carries the programme for The Tower, printed on a little card embedded with mystery seeds …
 
Philippa Hammond May 2024