★★★★★

“a clever, meaningful, and essential piece of theatre”

‘Dogs on the Metro’ at the Live Theatre is a precise and important reflection on adolescence, friendship, and consent. Masterfully written by Emilie Robson and directed by Maria Crocker, this personal two-hander is a force to be reckoned with, over it’s quick-paced and concise 60-minute course.

The show follows the fluctuating friendship of Jen (Sarah Balfour) and Dean (Dean Logan) and explores how boundaries can be pushed and taken to their limits as the two grow up together. Robson has created deeply fascinating and complex characters whose world and views the audience become quickly invested with. She creates a very tactile world with her language where “skin is made of needles” and the “room is made of balloons” and leaves the audience gasping for air from beginning to end.

The ambiguity of Jen and Dean’s relationship and their conflict hits every note, and pack punches as Balfour and Logan deliver every heart-wrenching moment with deep sincerity. Balfour’s confusion, frustration, and inner conflict feels wholly genuine, as does Logan’s characterisation of insecurity and immaturity. Both have a chilling chemistry and power to command the audience’s entire attention to their self-doubt and discomfort, conjuring goosebumps with the drop of hat.

One of the shining features of the piece is its deft connection to its place and time. ‘Dogs on the Metro’ is set mostly between metro carriages and house parties in Newcastle and utilises its clarity and ambiguity of destination to its fullest. Robson remarkably and gorgeously integrates Geordie dialect and place into a piece which reflects broader culture around platonic intimacy, gender, and boundaries. The characters and their familiarity with one another and their journey to and from home, school, and friend’s houses works so well amongst the murkiness of the story Jen urgently tries to take ownership of. As the non-linear story fractures and unfolds, the unreliability of the narration becomes more and more intriguing, and paints an impactful and deep-cutting message surrounding consent. The audience is led to trust and distrust as the plot thickens, and Crocker’s beautiful direction of the non-chronological structure does well to keep pace with the uncertainty and double meaning which the script dances with. For example, when Jen and Dean open the story, crossing over each other, it feels instantly playful and youthful; as the story develops, this technique takes on a fascinating new meaning around manipulation of narratives and truth.

It is hard to understate how complete ‘Dogs on the Metro’ feels. The script and the actors constantly flit around images, anecdotes, and ideas; none of which are wasted. ‘Dogs on the Metro’ feels wholly thought-through and tight. This goes for all aspects of design, too. From Amy Watts’ metro carriage set design which is creatively shifted between scenes to cage the characters into a claustrophobic atmosphere, to Drummond Orr’s sharp and engaging lighting design which emulates the flash a metro hurtling through a tunnel as well as an awkward early 2010s house party. Matthew Tuckey’s sound design is particularly entrancing and works electrically with the script to enhance sinister and tense moments. The crash of the metro carriage crescendoing with Balfour’s anger and upset, is an especially tactful way of exploring the ambiguity, anxiety, and self-doubt Jen experiences. All of these elements working together so firmly is utterly breath-taking.

‘Dogs on the Metro’ is a clever, meaningful, and essential piece of theatre, exploring consent and adolescence with beautiful clarity and intention.

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

At the centre point of the performance, ten-year-old Specky Clark, played by Faith Prendergast, walks across the stage to a radio in the rear corner and turns it on to a dance tune by David Holmes. The music begins quietly, appearing to come from the on-stage radio, and the child starts tentatively to move, before casting off his inhibitions and dancing freely and joyfully, the music booming from the theatre’s speakers. The movements recall the freestyle dance of someone alone in their bedroom: balletic kicks interwoven with techno-club fist pumping and are exhilarating and childlike.

In the rear of the stage, which is dressed as the abattoir where Clark has been sent to work by his overbearing aunts, a series of fabric sheets hang to imitate pigs’ carcasses. One of these opens and a head emerges. It is the pig killed by Clark on his first day at the abattoir that has been resurrected by the child’s dancing for Samhain, the Gaelic festival when the departed return to life, marking the beginning of the ‘Darker Half’ of the year. This moment of rupture also marks the point at which the performance shifts from the everyday into the supernatural and the performers’ dancing becomes freer and less bound by the expectations of the quotidian.

Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark is a fictionalised dramatization of the life of her great great grandfather, sent to live with relatives in Belfast after the death of his parents in Glasgow. It intermixes biography with Gaelic traditions and is permeated by the Irish language. The piece has a strong ensemble of nine dancers in gender-swapped multiroles including Erin O’Reilly, Maëva Berthelot and Malick Cissé. True to life, it is both funny and sad, and Specky’s domineering aunts’ manhandling of the child into and out of clothes and into work at the slaughterhouse to a refrain of ‘awk poor child’, ‘God love him’ is both tragic and comical. The physical performance of these aunts is a high point of the show as they peck birdlike around their new charge, a formidable double act that will shape the orphan’s life. The resurrected pig’s crawling and contorting is also excellent.

Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant, characterised by spiralling repetitions, and the sound design by Maxime Jerry Fraisse, powerful. The use of Sardinian throat singing when Specky is made to shoot the pig approaches the transcendent and original music by Lankum is good. The staging by scenographer Sabine Dargent conjures an achronological Belfast ranging from the mid-twentieth century to today, echoing the slippage between worlds of the performance’s climax. The opening is particularly striking, as Specky screams over the body of a dead parent, a life-sized puppet of death jerkily enters behind him, reaching to touch the lifeless body and raise it up – this shocking beginning sets the eerie tone for the piece.

However, some elements of the performance are less effective. A scene in which Specky is assaulted in the street after a day at work feels a little disconnected and inconsequential and the integration of Fortnite dances, while perhaps age appropriate for Specky, took me out of the moment. I also felt that the two sections of the performance, the ‘real’ and the ‘supernatural’, could have been better integrated and perhaps a longer runtime could have allowed for a fuller development of these ideas.

Nevertheless, in its scope and the powerful performances of Prendergast and the rest of the company there is much to commend Specky Clark, and the rapturous applause which greeted the end of the production suggests that maybe it just wasn’t for me.

DOGS ON THE METRO

Live Theatre

★★★★★

“a clever, meaningful, and essential piece of theatre”

DOGS ON THE METRO

Live Theatre

Reviewed on 6th May 2025

by Molly Knox

Photography by Von Fox Promotions

Previously reviewed at this venue:

DOGS ON THE METRO

DOGS ON THE METRO

DOGS ON THE METRO

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 9th May 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Luca Truffarelli

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

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