Tag Archives: Sadler’s Wells Theatre

SPECKY CLARK

★★★

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

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.



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:

SNOW WHITE: THE SACRIFICE | ★★★★★ | April 2025
SKATEPARK | ★★★★ | April 2025
MIDNIGHT DANCER | ★★★★ | March 2025
THE DREAM | ★★★★★ | March 2025
DEEPSTARIA | ★★★★ | February 2025
VOLLMOND | ★★★★★ | February 2025
DIMANCHE | ★★★★ | January 2025
SONGS OF THE WAYFARER | ★★★★ | December 2024
NOBODADDY (TRÍD AN BPOLL GAN BUN) | ★★★★ | November 2024
THE SNOWMAN | ★★★★ | November 2024

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

DEEPSTARIA

★★★★

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

DEEPSTARIA

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★★

“unique, mysterious, dreamlike, ethereal and challenging”

Since the beginning of time humankind has had a fascination with the unknown. Our imaginations and desires have been fired to explore the world, and beyond, to its limits. One of the greatest and simplest discoveries that this quest has revealed is the realisation that deep space and the deep sea are not that different. What is curious, though, is that we spend more time reaching out into space, while much of our own planet – under the sea – remains unexplored. This is the starting point, and the focus, of Sir Wayne McGregor’s latest work, “Deepstaria”.

The title comes from one of the ocean’s more mysterious jellyfish. A fragile, gossamer-thin creature. Ghost like and elusive. Its full name is ‘Deepstaria Enigmatica’, which is apt as McGregor’s dance piece is a very enigmatic affair. Collaborating with Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker, music producer LEXX and lighting designer Theresa Baumgartner, he has created something quite unique but, like bodies lost in space, we’re never really sure where it is going. There are clear references to the deep sea, and hints of outer space; and the vast unknown is symbolised by being plunged intermittently into a void of darkness. It is through a burst of this episodic blackness (courtesy of something called Vantablack Vision) that we are led into the dance.

Nine dancers inhabit the space. As though underwater their movements are floating. Aqueous and boneless. Sometimes in slow motion, sometimes gathering momentum, reflecting unknown currents that propel them. They emerge from rockpools of light, fluid and agile. McGregor’s choreography is mesmerising and the dancing meticulous. The music throbs, tethered to every sinew in mood and rhythm. But then a jolt severs the connection, and we are left in the void again. It is bewitching and disturbing.

The dancers leave the ocean; we appear to be on a shoreline. The light ebbs and flows like shallow waves. Baumgartner’s design certainly comes to the fore with some breathtaking effects. Slanting beams become fine rain with astonishing realism. Red hot washes alternate with marine blue mists. Through these sequences the performers ripple. Initially near-naked, later evolving into androgynous figures in Ilaria Martello’s diaphanous costumes – the deep-sea references underscored beautifully.

The experience is almost like gazing into a giant aquarium. We are transfixed, yet it is excruciatingly monotonous. Exquisitely so, nevertheless. Our senses are thrilled but the effect never quite reaches our heart. Like the musical soundtrack it scratches at the emotions until we almost feel we have had enough. Yet we never switch off. The balletic quality of the performers repeatedly draws us back into their complex world. It is fathomless and unfathomable. Like its gelatinous namesake, “Deepstaria” is unique, mysterious, dreamlike, ethereal and challenging. Sir Wayne McGregor CBE is a trailblazing choreographer who innovatively dips his toes into other artforms. With this show he dives headfirst into the depths. It is ultimately a thrilling collaboration.



DEEPSTARIA

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 27th February 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Ravi Deepres

 


 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

VOLLMOND | ★★★★★ | February 2025
DIMANCHE | ★★★★ | January 2025
SONGS OF THE WAYFARER | ★★★★ | December 2024
NOBODADDY (TRÍD AN BPOLL GAN BUN) | ★★★★ | November 2024
THE SNOWMAN | ★★★★ | November 2024
EXIT ABOVE | ★★★★ | November 2024
ΑΓΡΙΜΙ (FAUVE) | ★★★ | October 2024
STORIES – THE TAP DANCE SENSATION | ★★★★★ | October 2024
FRONTIERS: CHOREOGRAPHERS OF CANADA | ★★★★ | October 2024
TUTU | ★★★ | October 2024
CARMEN | ★★★★ | July 2024
THE OPERA LOCOS | ★★★★ | May 2024

 

DEEPSTARIA

DEEPSTARIA

DEEPSTARIA