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MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL: THE SHOW

★★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL: THE SHOW at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★★

“The prowess of Jones’ writing and Charlotte Bennett’s direction is unique and utterly refreshing”

My Mother’s Funeral: The Show is a crucial and stunning piece on trauma mining in the arts. Based on the experience of losing a loved one and discovering the expense of death unjust, Kelly Jones writes a masterpiece that challenges the notion that dying is the great leveller. A breath-taking meta-theatrical triumph: this performance follows 24-year-old Abigail as she desperately pitches and writes a play about her mother’s (very) recent death. When a stranger turns to you at the end of the show in tears letting you know they intend to immediately ring their mum, you know the performance has done its job.

Playwright Kelly Jones presents a stunningly honest voice on the issues of how the arts industry treats trauma and social commentary. Jones delivers a powerful and poetic script that skips between tearjerkingly direct experiences of navigating the death of a close family member and trying to respect a dead relative’s wishes. The complexity of her writing is brilliantly clever and pulls the audience in from the moment Nicole Sawyerr (playing Abigail) takes to the stage. Sawyerr gives her all to the performance, holding the audience tightly in the palm of her hand.

As a microphone takes centre stage, as does our grief-struck protagonist. Moments where Abigail takes the mic on her feelings work beautifully into the meta-theatrical premise of the show and the sound production flies in support of it. Touching on themes of gentrification, demonisation of the working class, and estranged family relationships, My Mother’s Funeral touches nerves with the utmost composure and tact. The throughline of commentary on the divide between working class communities and the arts industry is sharp and so very needed. As the show holds a mirror to its paying audience, gasps and tears and laughter are elicited from the audience.

The staging (Rhys Jarman) is dynamic and drives the creativity of the show. Similarly, the gorgeous lighting (Joshua Gadsby) and sound design (Asaf Zohar) are as electric as the knife-edged acting. Samuel Armfield (playing Abigail’s brother and a particularly distasteful theatre producer) and Debra Baker (playing Abigail’s mum, healthcare professionals and an ignorant actor) multi-role phenomenally. The two flawlessly switch between different accents and well-crafted physicality. The direction is tasteful, thoughtful and comedic from beginning to end. This show catches you howling with laughter one second and wiping tears away the next in well-earned moments of emotional tension. Armfield and Baker’s supporting roles combine to pressure the devastation and rage of Sawyerr’s acting as her voice echoes both forcefully and delicately into the space. In particular, the climax of the show is directed with terrific effect, highlighting the pathetic hypocrisy of marketing trauma in theatre at the expense of real people.

My Mother’s Funeral breaks down what it means to write from your own experience to receive financial gratification from others. The prowess of Jones’ writing and Charlotte Bennett’s direction is unique and utterly refreshing amongst an arts landscape that is so readily available to sacrifice its creatives for the sake of entertainment and shock value. The perspective this show provides and its innovative delivery and conception is deeply essential.


MY MOTHER’S FUNERAL: THE SHOW at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Roundabout @ Summerhall

Reviewed on 23rd August 2024

by Molly Knox

Photography by Nicola Young

 

 


MY MOTHER’S

MY MOTHER’S

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THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN

★★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★★

“an innocent, wondrous delight”

The Show for Young Men will not change the world. It doesn’t have an obvious “point”, or “message”, or even structure. But none of that matters. Because in its simplicity and tenderness, it touched my soul more than any other piece I’ve seen at Fringe.

The plot and setting are a singular, sustaining note. A construction worker is toyed by and toys with a young boy who has stumbled upon his site. That’s it. For the whole hour. The set (Rachel O’Neil) itself is simple: three carbon tubes of various lengths (all conspicuously small-child-sized in width), a few moving boards and a retractable ladder. With this starting tool box, the choreographers (lead artist Eoin McKenzie with choreographic support from Aya Kobayashi) concoct a whole world’s worth of playthings. Like a creative child not gifted store-bought toys, they turn their mundane objects into rockets and tanks and slides and every material facet of adventure. A personal high light of this ingenuity comes just after the halfway point. The construction worker, struck into a depression by his conflicted resistance to vulnerability and intimacy, has his pain illuminated by a small light shown through the circular boundary of the industrial tube. He is sung a song by his young counterpart, who it transpires, once the construction worker leaves, is directly in the line of the light. As such, he shines.

Indeed, this shining is accentuated by the wonderful talent and chemistry of the two performers. Robbie Synge plays the construction worker, and brings an evident vulnerability of masculinity desperately scratching to drag down a fundamentally playful, compassionate, wonderful heart. This vulnerability overtakes him sometimes, and the rift between the two this causes is damaging and profound, but it makes the resolution and rekindling all the more wonderful; a rekindling which is already highly rewarding due to the innocent joy that’s sparked between the two. Much of this joy is attributable to Alfie, more or less playing himself, the adorably cheeky but impressively organized 10 year old who sends Robbie into (somewhat voluntary) loops. Their chases around ladders and swings around (and into) industrial tubing bring out the inner child not just in Robbie but in all of us. In an age of cynicism, the overwhelming innocence and friendliness of their interactions are irresistible.

However, it’s after the resolution where the play really enters visionary territory, delving into more exploratory and stylistic sequences which highlight the wonder of shared struggle and the absurdity of bottling it up under the auspice of being ‘a man’. A joy shared is a joy doubled and sorrow shared is a sorrow halved: an idiom this play embodies to its every detail. Indeed, the aforementioned scene where Alfie sings “Half the world away”, a song written by an ex-construction worker as it happens, is massively powerful; an affectionate, calming melancholy that feels like a warm patch of sun striking one’s skin. Indeed, the technical aspects of the play are superb throughout. The lighting (Katharine Williams) is simple and largely diegetic, save for the occasional blackout, but the urban-auburn spotlights that visually reflect that sense of melancholic sunset, and the party lighting which accentuates the high-energy moments of the play, are perfectly executed. The sound design (Greg Sinclair) is perhaps even more creative and effective; a football podcast featuring Lineker, Shearer and Wright sets a day-to-day scene wonderfully, and its shift to pop songs and dance anthems at the bequest of Alfie is hilarious and joyful in equal measure.

The Show for Young Men is an innocent, wondrous delight. It shoves toxic masculinity’s face in the dirt without ever having to explicitly acknowledge it, by playfully illustrating the possibility for healthy, vulnerable, loyal relationships between any kind of man.


THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Assembly @ Dance Base

Reviewed on 23rd August 2024

by Horatio Holloway

Photography by Andrew Perry

 

 


THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN

THE SHOW FOR YOUNG MEN

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