On This Day: 26th May

Back Before The Lockdown this was a day for the unexpected.

in 2015

There are a few actors I adore, whose work is consistently impressive and there are, equally, a few that I just cannot take a liking too. In this latter case it's not necessarily that they are bad actors but often that I have never found any of their characters sympathetic or understandable.

Unfortunately Gina McKee falls into that second category so I was a little torn when she was announced as the lead in Florian Zeller's The Mother at the Ustinov Studio in Bath. A year earlier I had seen a production of The Father (from the same author and creative team at the same venue) which was simply magnificent.
So, trusting the team at the Ustinov I put my doubts aside and booked and ... boy, did she prove me wrong!
Using a similar technique as used for The Father, of presenting the same scene but from slightly different perspectives we are constantly wrong-footed in trying to work out who's view we are witnessing, what is actually real, what is invention, what might be psychosis. Is this a mother coming to terms with her children moving away to live their separate lives, or a woman in the midst of marital strife, or on the verge of mental breakdown?
A beautifully constructed piece that continually prods the audience, to ask 'who is this woman, why is she doing this?' until, as the final heart-rending scenes unfold you realise it is actually asking about your own life and your relationship with your own mother.
Oh, and Gina McKee? Yeah, she took us through every facet of motherhood from triumph to tragedy quite brilliantly. 

in 2017

Nudity on stage is an odd thing to witness. I have seen plays where the actor is clearly not entirely comfortable with taking their clothes off in front of an audience or the director uses props or unusual choreography to 'protect' the artist. Then there are times when the actor has fully realised their character and getting naked is exactly what they would do so it becomes not an 'act' but a natural thing for them to do. As an audience member it can thus be either something awkward and slightly discomforting or just another facet of that character's story.
And so to this day in 2017 where the actor, and there is only one, does not get naked but is naked; wholly, completely, and throughout the entire performance.

This Is Not Culturally Significant at the now, sadly, permanently closed The Bunker Theatre in London starts with a naked man as a female web-cam porn actress performing a sex act on herself! It's a shock opening but it works as Adam Scott-Rowley quickly spins through a raft of diverse characters each dealing with their different demons in a variety of, sometimes linked, ways. Without the need to change costume he uses a couple of props and a remarkable ability to transform his body and voice to embody the physicality of each of them.
In an extreme form of 'stripped back' theatre we don't get distracted by the facade of a character's life but see them directly as people with issues who struggle and sometimes triumph. Impressive and thought-provoking.