“Wallwein peoples her story with a deft and accurate physicality which it is a pleasure to watch”
Walking in to take a seat for Glue was quite magical. Red balloons floated above two cabaret-style tables, a flying-suit clad mannequin was spotlit on an otherwise dark stage, and Jaydev Mistry’s gentle but insistent guitar acted as underscore. Louise Wallwein was sitting in the audience, miked up, suited and booted and ready for action, but chatting to us all as we took our seats. This combination of relaxed accessibility and focused theatricality set the tone for the evening. And what an utterly mesmerising evening it was.
Accompanied throughout by Mistry’s atmospheric playing, and with the judicious use of a few visually arresting props – a pair of boxing gloves, a magnificent wimple – plus a simple but effective lighting design, Louise Wallwein shared the story of her life with us. Of her childhood spent in and out of care, and of her search for her birth mother in particular. Wallwein has a wonderful voice – warm, expressive, Mancunian to the bone – which she uses as a musician plays an instrument. It is by turns playful, harsh, tremulous and resilient, but coming always from a profound place of joy. Her poetry flows as naturally as her conversation and it is impossible not to be carried along by its current wherever that may take us. There is pain in this story, but there is triumph, and humour, and dancing too. And there are characters. From Denise, ‘the hardest woman in Salford’, to the surprisingly likeable Sister Philomena, Wallwein peoples her story with a deft and accurate physicality which it is a pleasure to watch.
Wallwein also understands the power of the real. When she brandishes her social services file, saying ‘this is actually it’, theatre is suspended for a few seconds, and we are momentarily in a starker, less forgiving world. Equally, it feels incredibly intimate knowing that it was THAT red dress and THAT flying suit that she was wearing at the important gigs we’ve been invited to drop in on.
Towards the end of the story that she shares with us over the course of the evening, we witness a crisis. ‘I am disappearing’, Wallwein repeats, in desperation. Glue is a testament to the fact that Louise Wallwein has definitely not disappeared. She is most emphatically present; as a poet, a performer, and a woman. When I took my seat at the beginning of the evening, she was having her mike adjusted. ‘I feel like Madonna’ she quipped. Madge should be so lucky, to be in such company.
