DAVID HAS BEEN AT THE THEATRE AGAIN

David Ralf reviews (mostly) theatre (mostly) in London. He is a Contributing Editor for Exeunt Magazine and writes for The Stage. He draws pens with the pens he is drawing as Pens by Pens. Browse the archive here.

[davidralf]

Gibb & Adler - an Adler & Gibb fic

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The grass is cooler than the air, and I am thinking about our dog, on the floor back in our house. There was no blood on him, or the floor. It was as if he was asleep. Like it was when you went. But there’s blood just pouring out of me. “There,” the actress is saying – the actress wearing our old clothes – “the art dog and the art wife. Two for two.” “Busy... night...”, her coach pants weakly from somewhere further off. I hear her toss the gun into our grass and I see her face appear turned sideways like a slide tossed across a projector. "You have been real helpful, Margaret. I really think I've had a breakthrough. I'm going to do such a good job with her. Really. You'd be so proud if you saw it. I mean, obviously that's not going to happen. But if you did see it- I'm gonna be just like her. And I'll share her with everyone." I fill my lungs and something rattles inside me. Just enough to tell her. Tell her I watched you fade away. My partner, my audience. Just as we had got away from that noisy world which was drowning us out, just as we had built ourselves a house, a theatre for us and no-one else. Tell her how I told you stories about the first time we met. How it had already been written so large in our imaginations that the real details of that exhibition - the radiator, the posters, how we looked, what we said - were paltry. Forgotten by you, and grey to me, in comparison to that myth of us that we had told each other. And tell her that although everyone thought I was the strong one, I wasn't. That I needed you because it was like the sun was shining directly on my brain when you were near me. And tell her that I held your cold head in my hands, your chest across my lap, for a whole two days as I wondered what to do - knowing I only wanted to follow you, knowing I couldn't. I'd tried that years ago, when the pills didn't take, and knew the journey back was worse than taking leave. We were leashed together like climbers. And when you fell my crampons hugged the rock and my hand shook but stayed firm, and I held you up. Remember when we wore the same clothes in New York and laughed when people confused us and we did each other so well and you said it was your favourite piece of all because it was for no one but us? I have enough breath to whisper how I told the authorities it had been me. That Adler, not Gibb, had gone. I have enough breath to say I'd been playing you from the moment I heaved your head off my lap and fixed myself your favourite meal. Enough breath to say that it was easy - that you came to me like a party piece and I was so pleased, somewhere in the mind which I was trying to give over to you, because you'd always said that the best art felt effortless. I let the nature come in because you'd loved it so much. I wouldn't give the dog treats because you never did, and I took it for those long walks you loved more and more because I knew that's how you'd make peace with life without me. How I wished it had been you grieving for me, and so I let you do it, freely. How I took a job in a gas station because you needed to eat, because you would never leave that house. A piece just for you. The audience remembered by the artist. The artist undone in the process. The least consumable work I could conceive of. It was for no one else. Because: who else was there? I decide she doesn't need to know. Just like every time. It's better for the work, if they never know. And my head feels so light now, I can feel your clenched hands and your pursed lips relax. Your bad knee, which I perfected over years loosens and becomes mine. It's over. I'm becoming me. It's been a long time. I'm becoming me again, and I'm following you. Tumbling after. Impersonation Piece #1. Gibb by Adler. My best.

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For more on Tim Crouch’s Adler & Gibb see www.adlerandgibb.com and www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/adler-and-gibb.

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Jonny and the Baptists: Eat the Poor - Summerhall

Watching Eat the Poor is like a bit like listening to Rage Against the Machine, if you listen to Rage Against the Machine like I do, which involves a lot of righteous head banging and then hearing the odd phrase which makes you ask “Wait, what is this one about exactly?” This process sends you back to the lyrics, back to the Wikipedia, and then back to the song – headbanging only slightly less enthusiastically, not because the track isn’t on point, but because unbridled enthusiasm suddenly looks a little less cool.

Unbridled enthusiasm would probably describe my reaction to most of Jonny & The Baptists: Eat the Poor. They have a song about totalitarian swans. They have a song asking why we don’t bury Thatcher every week, so positive was the effect of the pageantry. They make repeated jokes at the expense of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who flew from New York to London last year especially to vote in the House of Lords (something he has rarely bothered to do before) in favour of tax credit cuts for low-income workers.

Jonny Donahoe opens the show by saying that the biggest driver of inequality in Britain is inherited wealth. He closes the show by saying the same thing, and points out that his and his bandmate Paddy Gervers’ and their director Will Young’s parents are all coming to see the show, and their message to them is “Give it away. All of it. Okay, most of it”. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Give It Away” even plays as we leave The Roundabout at Summerhall.

This message about inherited wealth being a huge driving force behind our current extreme levels of poverty and inequality is both a good one and a difficult one to hear. It is a difficult one to hear personally, if you have wealthy parents, or are a wealthy parent. It is a difficult one also to bring together with prevailing notions of how life and society work too. Other leftist notions like nationalising public services and instituting progressive taxes are (in my highly privileged position) far easier to bear. The question brings into focus expected lifespan and those sociological ephemera which are loosely pinned to it, like career, like retirement, like legacy. The idea of not passing on your estate is an idea that is disruptive to the way people expect their lives to work, what they might choose to do with them.

I think that disruption is a good thing, almost certainly. But Jonny and The Baptists’ show doesn’t really explore this question. It tops and tails their show, which professes to be about it, but the sandwich filling doesn’t actually dramatise or even deal with that issue.

Their tale is one of inequality writ small: the locus on attention reduced to the band itself. We push into the future, past Jonny & The Baptists’ current show and watch as Jonny takes a job writing lyrics on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical – hugely successful trash which earns him millions. Paddy’s live takes a different turn: without Jonny and the act, he’s left struggling for income and it isn’t long before he’s on the streets. Jonny turns his back on his friend – just as Jonny had warned us at the start of the show, when he said that studies likethis one showed that the rich are shown to be less empathetic than the poor. They are reunited by the inevitable revolution which comes as inequality grows to breaking point, and they live – of course – in fear of the totalitarian swans.

The humour is fantastic, and unashamedly left-wing, while still being critical of recent Labour governments as well as the coalition and Tory regimes. The lyrics are silly and Andrew Lloyd Clever, and the easy rapport that both Jonny and Paddy have with their audience allows them to lurch between Diana jokes and heartfelt songs in seconds. I was headbanging (smiling, nodding, laughing) all the way through the hour. But they pulled at a particular thread – inherited wealth – which is both complicated and fertile territory, and I think their routine is robust enough to delve a little deeper.

For Exeunt.

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We Are Ian - In Bed With My Brother - Pleasance Dome

It’s not really about Ian. It’s not about acid house, or ecstasy – it’s not even about doing the hot potato and the cold spaghetti over and over again. It’s about the ‘We’ – Nora Alexander, Kat Cory and Dora Lynn. They dance and they pull faces. They don’t speak.

They listen to Ian – whose voiceover pulses the intensity of a lightbulb (a beguiling visual way of representing audio which is also on show in Paper Bird’s cracking one-woman ‘caravan-specific’ show MOBILE), and hear how Ian thinks that they have nothing. “Fuck all.” He’s comparing their scene to his – the illegal rave culture that sprung up in the 80s – tunes, ecstasy and weekends spent in some disused warehouse.

Clowning company In Bed With My Brother have created an acid house scene reminiscent of that scene from Spaced with the white dungarees and hyperactive video design, but – decade blurring aside – they get the audience up on their feet just five minutes intoWe Are Ian, drawing us into their bigger and bigger takes on two immortal dance moves.

The performers share digestive biscuits, a wilful misinterpretation of Ian’s throwaway mention of ‘brown biscuit’, and we watch them gurn and hug and dance again. Whether there’s an allergy issue involved in spraying half-chewed gobbets of digestive biscuits into an audience, I can’t be certain, but the grotesque chaos repeatedly feels purposefully childish, driven by both the attitude that being told about the Thatcher years instils in those who didn’t live through them, and as a foil to Ian’s at once patronising and encouraging response to their art – both telling them that it will come to an end, that they will have to grow up and get on with real life, and that he admires them, doing the ‘theatre stuff’, making things for themselves. It sits uncomfortably in the mind next to the cultural dearth he posits at the beginning of the piece. ‘Fuck all’ is a phrase which hangs over you, especially when your cultural landscape is being negatively compared to a derelict building and a borrowed soundsystem.

More charitably, Ian’s diagnosis is about disobedient art. He talks about the transition of acid house into the club scene, run just within the demands of the law (albeit by football hooligans and gangsters) and laments that it wasn’t the same.

We Are Ian doesn’t fit easily into a genre. I’m sure all of In Bed With My Brother’s work is disobedient in that small way. The fringe guide’s ‘Comedy’ and ‘Clown’ labels don’t come close. What was crowd control in the first five minutes becomes, or rather cunningly evokes, a genuine symbiosis between audience and performers. As the three of them dance on and on to exhaustion, ‘We’ cheer them, rouse them, join them. We have joined them. We recognise them (and perhaps something of Ian) in us. And the show effortlessly (dramaturgically, I mean – the sweat is pouring down their faces) makes dancing unceasingly until dawn a metaphor for three young women making art, getting tired, reaching out to people, and carrying on.

For Exeunt.

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The Toad Knew - Edinburgh International Festival

The Toad Knew is a steampunk dreamlike fantasia, a series of circus and dance routines tenuously connected by aesthetic tendons. The red curtain across the front of the stage flutters and waves like a living thing, and is pull offstage like a parade of stiltwalkers. It doesn’t move like a stage curtains normally can, and the same velvety texture extends to the draped clothing of Mariama who sings soulful, reverby half-time music hall tunes.

While it has Beckettian notes in the abstract, existential clowning and the faded, tired costuming of its rundown music hall characters, The Toad Knew also has a distinct science fiction flavour, with a TARDIS-like illuminated central invention that has a life of its own, half understood by the mad professor/artist portrayed by James Thiérrée. Half-way through the piece it gives birth to a River Tam-like ghost in the machine.

In the opening moments, however, the stagecraft itself is the centre of attention. With some of the most sophisticated tricks out there, it nevertheless holds on to a human quality – like a circus act itself which stays relatable to human physicality, adding mastery and magic in just the right quantities. A snake of metal raises up from a haphazard coil on the stage floor, vertebrae by vertebrae becoming a spiral staircase – each stair locking into place just in time for Thiérrée to descend it. Later it becomes a whirling climbing frame for three performers at a time.

Apart from a couple of key moments however, the dance/physical routines largely hold themselves apart from the painstakingly inventive set. They seem a little small in the King’s Theatre, although the unshowy blink-and-you’ll-miss-them contortions from handstand specialist Valérie Doucet are a standout component. There is no question – even coming to the piece completely new to his work – that Thiérrée is at home as the actor-manager, and his incredibly talented company have a distinct role of their own. The main man has several solo routines, whilst the rest of company largely collaborate on routines with him or each other. This is perfectly understandable for an exceptional circus performer (with an incredible pedigree, if you go in for that kind of thing, being a grandson of Charlie Chaplin), but it is unfortunate that this trickles down into the relationships of the roles they play as well.

There is something fairytale and undeniably French being explored in these decisions: Yann Nédélec and Samuel Duterte play stooges and servants to Thiérrée’s mad, distracted, professor magician, with the very funny Nédélec almost in a kind of Igor role. Doucet’s role as Thiérrée’s sister is far less precise than her movement – she could as well be a daughter or a lover – and when Thi Mai Nguyen appears as the machine-spirit, their similar size, hair, physique and movement, alongside deliberate mirroring, collapse the two characters together in a way that feels dismissive particularly of whatever relationship has been built up between Thiérrée and Doucet.

Thiérrée’s solo routine with a massive fur fringed coat filled me with glee, an ensemble multiplying plates routine was incredible fun, that spiral staircase is hard to beat, and a final theatrical coup truly achieves the mad slow motion dreamstate that the whole explores. Yet when meaning is as fractured and stage action so full of possibility as it is here, it feels odd to have a very traditional, hierarchical set of relationships at its heart.

For Exeunt.

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Swansong - DugOut - Pleasance Courtyard

Things I’d miss: friends, family, libraries, protracted board games, gin, David Attenborough.

Things I’d be glad are gone: pop-up ads, insects, hangovers, totalitarian regimes, disease, pigeons

After their big musical devised shows The Sunset Five and Inheritance Blues, Swansong is DugOut’s chamber piece, with unaccompanied hymns replacing the rockabilly sensibilities of their earlier work. Written by Tom Black and Sadie Spencer it’s the tightest show the Leeds University graduate company have produced to date – dealing with the darkest of material while still ensuring that it is shot through with esoteric humour.

Four strangers have escaped a world-destroying flood. They sit aboard a pedalo shaped like a swan, and they have nearly run out of protein bars. As far as they are aware, they are the last folks on earth, and they can’t stand one another. But intercut with their squabbling there are flashes of strange religious ceremonies which seem to be derived from the story of these four ‘founder’ ‘fathers’. As Claire, Stephen, Adam and Bobbi decide in broad but ultimately naturalistic sceneswhether to mourn the end of all the great things in humanity or celebrate the end of all plague, cruelty and evil, they shape this odd future religion, which is accompanied by swanlike (by which I mean ‘species-accurate’ rather than ‘graceful’) dumbshow and harmonies.

While there is something of Anne Washburn’s post-electric Mr Burns to the premise, Swansong’s character-led humour and its upbeat ending makes for a thoroughly uplifting apocalyptic show. While each of their characters fall into simple categories – the joker, the cynic, the jock and the hippy, each is prevented from being one-note by generous performances from DugOut familiar faces. Tom Black’s Adam sighs and moans his way through the end of the world before discovering from first principles his own reasons to be optimistic. Ed MacArthur as Stephen demonstrates the gentle comradeship hiding behind stereotypical laddish behavior. Sports-mad Claire (Nina Shenkman) has a near hyperactive insistence on action, which reveals itself to be capable leadership.

It’s almost as if each of these convenient identities hides a different kind of socially-sanctioned compassion – a necessary outlet in a world which Adam reminds us is full of war, child abuse and malaria, but in which four strangers could also experience such difficulty pedalling together, let alone speaking. The brilliantly tight-lipped newcomer to the company Charlotte Merriam plays the vegan, spiritualist Bobbi – and while it is a kind of cruel punchline to have her discovers her bloodlust in extremis, what lies underneath her highly mockable opinions and beliefs is always revealed to be love and generosity at root. A resiliently good-natured show, this is DugOut at their best, if not their biggest. It should go down in history – however long that turns out to be.

For Exeunt.

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Scooby-Doo! Live – Musical Mysteries - London Palladium

For Exeunt.

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The Fall - James Fritz - Finborough Theatre

“Exceptional new play charges through life at breakneck speed and sets the standard for youth theatre commissions”

★★★★ review for The Stage.

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The Plough and the Stars - Sean O’Casey - National Theatre

I last saw The Plough and the Stars in 2010, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, directed by Wayne Jordan. In this, the centenary year of the Easter Rising, the play looks and feels remarkably similar. A satire which was written to directly address those who romanticised the actions and the sacrifice of the self-proclaimed Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, it is not a play which glosses itself for an unfamiliar audience.

It does not tell the story of the different groups that joined together to declare Irish Independence (although Sean O’Casey was involved in and all too familiar with those machinations), the story of the doomed General Post Office occupation, or the betrayal of gun-runner Roger Casement. It is the story of broadly stereotypical poor Irish characters who are hurt, softened, complicated and brought together as their city becomes the victim of both Irish revolutionary zeal and the brute force of the British Army. It is the tragedy of those who are devalued in any and every conflict – the poor, the sick, the immobile.

Vicki Mortimer’s design is impressive, creating the four distinct scenes which begin in a world of poverty during a period of relative stability and move to scenes of poverty in disorder and martial law, like a 1910s Blasted. Each of these big scenes have complex demands built into the text, which Mortimer attacks with revolves, wheeled platforms and flown scenery for a picture-perfect result. Yet unfortunately in all but the first scene the staging forces every actor into a straight line across the front of the stage. On the Lyttleton stage, the tenement buildings and the bar feel impossibly expansive. The scene set on the stoop of the tenement, as British artillery bombards Dublin during the Rising itself, is intense and evocative, with gunshots zipping around the heads of the bewildered, scared and occasionally looting residents.

Ultimately it’s a frustrating piece of programming from the National Theatre, appropriate rather than motivated, as without an audience that has an emotional response to the Easter Rising the play’s best work is not being effectively done. The play never lifts its eye from those that are most at the whim of conflict, whose agency is all in self-preservation. But the production itself does not seem to go looking for this interpretation, or have more to add. It comes into its own in the second half, but the tough opening scenes drag, and the difficult central turn of Nora Clitheroe flounders as Judith Roddy and Fionn Walton (Jack Clitheroe) fail to engage us in the first scene, and so Nora’s desperate sadness and madness, the soul and poetry of the play, ring melodramatic rather than melancholic.

The Plough and the Stars shows at the National Theatre until 22nd October 2016. Click here for more information.

For Exeunt.

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Landscape With Monsters - C!RCA - Latitude Festival

C!RCA’s new show, premiering in the UK at Latitude Festival reminds me of nothing so much as the Lyric’s Secret Theatre company’s Show 5: A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts. The primary difference is that the tasks of the latter were small scale, low stakes ‘impossibilities’ – eating a lemon, hiding in a suitcase. In Landscape With Monsters they are circus feats – balances and lifts, climbs and holds. But they carry the same feeling of unpredictable urgency and anxiety that the 20-something Secret Theatre used to speak eloquently about growing up as a series of near impossible challenges.

In C!RCA’s hands this nervous energy keeps you on the edge of your seat through scenes that are markedly political. Rather than that swan-like quality of some acrobatic performance which hides effort, every shaking muscle, wobble and sweating brow is on show. This is hard work in a harsh world, populated with massive, heavy ladders and beams, wooden crates that hide bodies and have limited room. Rooted in each individual performer’s relationship to their fellows and to the world, the routines pit them against each other, in a race to the top, or a struggle for personal space and self-definition. There is not enough room for everyone on top of that crate or in that box. Something has to give.

Landscape With Monsters also forces the performer-characters to collaborate – finding workarounds and supporting each other to navigate massive set items – everything seems to dwarf the performers. The design is informed by and designed to reflect an industrial backdrop, pitting the landscape against its inhabitants who seem so fragile by comparison. Of course, naturally, they must work together. How could they not?

Their closeness as an ensemble is striking when something goes wrong: a see-sawing beam spins out of place and each performer – both on the beam and off – yell “No!” in unison and spring forward to steady the apparatus. But the piece never lets up in putting its performers’ heads between the lion’s jaws – or under a falling A-frame ladder. A heart-stopping series of feats with incredible variety and charm, Landscape With Monsters is the finest piece of circus I’ve ever seen, but it is also clear and compelling drama.

For Exeunt.

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Super Night Shot - Gob Squad - Latitude Festival

Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot is devised to illuminate cities at night – finding love and connection on streets where perhaps it is apparently absent. It takes the shape of four simultaneously recorded and presented one hour-long camcorder videos. At Latitude though, the chosen ‘city’ is Henham Park, and the streets are the pathways packed with festivalgoers, volunteers and staff, the summer afternoon falling away to a warm early evening across stalls and bars and marquees.

The four filmmaker stars each have a different role and goal: to find the perfect location for the final scene, to be the hero of the film, to publicise the hero and to find the perfect willing participant for the big kiss at the film’s close.

The success of the piece is in its excellent movement between the unscripted and the planned – the moments of unpredictable conversations with passers-by alongside perfectly timed synchronicity of camera movements, twirled umbrellas or the donning of masks, even when the four filmmakers are hundreds of feet away from each other and out of sight.

Filmed just an hour before it is shown, and because everyone is within a half-mile radius, there’s every chance that audience members will have seen the work being filmed, or – as I did – find themselves in the actual film.

As the Squad rehearsed the previous day, the whole event contributed to the weirdness of the Festival atmosphere that the film was celebrating. On Thursday you see a man wearing khaki twirling an umbrella. You assume he’s a nutty piece of festival colour – an eccentric chap having a good time. On Friday the act is repeated in front of a tripod, and an hour later the act is decoded.

While Henley Park does feel like it becomes a little city (or more cynically, a London away from London) during Latitude, the interrogation of passers-by in this festival context has the character of wacky vox pops rather than an examination or portrait of a city that I imagine Super Night Shots has had in its other incarnations since 2003 when the project was first devised in Berlin.

Without that grounding – the sense, perhaps of danger that comes from initiating conversations while wearing a rabbit mask with strangers in a living city after dark – the exercise feels a little fluffy. The humour is there in buckets, but the project feels more like light entertainment than it could do. The emphasis is thrown onto the engagement with filmic tropes – the hero, the antihero, the love interest, the big popcorn-selling kiss in the perfect location, and in a uniquely friendly atmosphere, any satire on these elements is a little toothless.

Super Night Shot is an impressive technical achievement – in the quick production turnaround and (live?) sound mixing of four camera feeds, and in the precise performance work where performers are also their own camera operators – but bringing it into the friendliest of surroundings, rather robs it of its incisive concept: to wage “a war on anonymity”. And perhaps that indicates that a festival, and perhaps Latitude in particular, is nothing like a city after all.

For Exeunt.

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Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare in the Squares

“Uneven garden romp that doesn’t engage with the darkness of Shakespeare’s play” 

★★ review for The Stage.

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The Shadow King - Barbican

This is a strange one. Because I’m writing this review of The Shadow King in a different land to the one in which I sat in the Barbican Theatre last night: the closing of the polls, the counting, the declaration of the UK’s decision to leave the EU, the resignation of our Prime Minister. I do not think the company from Malthouse Theatre, Australia will mind.

Their version of King Lear – telling a story that is not just British, but British to its mythic bones – is set in Australia. Kamahi Djordon King, the Fool, guides us into the rehousing of Lear in Modern English and Kriol, telling us that he gives us our stories retold as Aboriginal people would retell ‘milli milli’ – stories from their own literary tradition – and using with singing and music from an onstage band whose upbeat Australian reggae is as overtly political as the rest of the production.

A successful man, Lear, hands over the fruits of his success to his daughters: land he has bought according to white men’s laws. The Barbican Theatre stage is covered with copper sand. It is kicked about, passes through closed fists, holds discarded, bloody daggers.

It is all about the land. Rattling through the play in 95 minutes, land is again and again at the heart of the production. The Fool even tells us as much, making clear that Lear finds his errors in the wilderness, guided by Edgar, disguised with traditional Aboriginal white paint across his near naked body. The land was never any man’s to sell, not Lear’s to buy, not his to shrug off responsibility for.

And this morning I feel that I need to walk this country. London has voted to remain in the EU. Every other region in England has voted to leave it. Around the country people are celebrating a hard-fought victory, and almost everyone I know is swallowing bitter defeat – many of them campaigners, several of them who have actively participated in political campaigning for the first time in their lives. They are also mostly Londoners.

I am one of the bewildered Remainers blinking with disbelief this morning – but if we do not actively (re)connect politically and culturally with the towns and the people and the land of this country beyond the M25 we will stay bewildered.

But we do not have a second to rave atop chalky cliffs. The Shadow King’s condensed action (Gloucester’s blinding happens in a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it transition) makes the transition from Edmund’s charismatic underdog trickster to murderous backstabbing warlord feel like a smash cut. And we are surrounded by supposed leaders who are just as snakelike as Jimi Bani’s Edmund, just as self-interested and short-sighted as Goneril and Regan, who stand on the metallic edifices above the land (and as the play goes on, barely get their feet dirty with it), and win us again and again with soundbites and saccharine lies, whose only concern is to get into each other’s pockets, each other’s beds, each other’s positions.

It’s an incredibly focused production – using Lear as a convenient structure for its own ends, as opposed to serving a play, and seeing whether it has anything to say. In these hand, King Lear is the story of folks that have been hurt, and are wary of being hurt again. While it never leaves the landscape and the specificity of Aboriginal experience, there’s so much that resonates to this very moment in the UK.

The only hope is the hope that can be found in the very first scene of the play, in the radical love of Cordelia, a love that is not selfish, a love that is not a soundbite. A love that in Rarriwuy Hick’s mouth sounds so simple and so magically unfamiliar in a single moment.

A love that is also too silent. And rediscovered too late.

The Shadow King is on until 2nd July 2016. Click here for more information.

For Exeunt.

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Gertrude - The Cry - Howard Barker - Theatre N16

★★ review for The Stage.

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Decades - Leo Butler - Ovalhouse

★★★ review for The Stage.

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Cuttin It - Charlene James - Young Vic

Joanna Scotcher’s design is a set of stairs in the concrete-grey of institutions, of social housing. It is huge. The two young women who deliver Charlene James’ text are dwarfed by its structure, and enclosed by it. Above them, bright red fencing hangs – again: institutional, restrictive. They appear from hidden holes within it, like a bunker.

And there is a huge incision right through the design.

Incision isn’t quite right. The cut is neat, through the staircase, downstage to upstage. It creates angles, it’s artistic. “Clean” even, that word which Iqra (Tsion Habte) uses to reassure Muna (Adelayo Adedayo) about the procedures that she helps her ‘Auntie’ perform. But the red fencing above is torn, twisted metal. There’s precision and care in one action, and unintended brutality and cruelty follows. Scotcher’s design is seismic – a physical wound that refuses to heal.

No one enters or exits through the wound in the stage. No one acknowledges it. The girls walk around it, step over the gap, don’t look down. Don’t allow yourself to think about it.

In fact, under Gbolahan Obisesan’s direction, neither girl looks directly at much. Delivering their intertwining monologues to the audience, they talk past each other, only breaking into direct conversation – and corresponding eye-contact – twice, for a moment of first tentative friendship between the two Somalia-born schoolgirls, and a heightened stand-off as Muna realises what her new friend helps do to young girls on the weekend.

It takes a lot to talk about female genital mutilation. It takes longer if you’re living with it, if you’ve been told it’s normal, if you’ve been told it’s special, that it’s part of your identity. James’ text uses Muna’s fear that what has happened to her will also be visited upon her younger sister to drive the topic into the open between the two girls.

“This is real. It’s happening now in towerblocks on Saturday mornings,” Muna tells us at her most direct – a young woman angrily telling a Young Vic audience something they don’t want to acknowledge.

Azusa Ono’s lighting is ever so slightly on the nose, with violent flashes of light emanating from the wound of the set during speeches recounting violent and horrifying acts. But lighting and design come together perfectly for the set’s final heart-breaking reveal, contextualising these two young women’s conflict within the rise of FGM in the UK.

A big co-production between the Young Vic & the Royal Court Theatre with Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and The Yard Theatre, this is an important play which could have been swallowed by a sense of worthiness. Instead an earnest but measured text is ably supported by two very strong young performers and a knockout, suggestive and ruminative design,

Cuttin’ It is on until Saturday 11 June 2016 at the Young Vic and then touring to the The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Royal Court, Sheffield Crucible and The Yard.

For Exeunt.

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Love, Bombs and Apples - Hassan Abdulrazzak - Arcola

“Quartet of monologues with a profound ability to find humour in the most over-trodden tragedies”

★★★★ review for The Stage.

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The Joke - Camden People’s Theatre

“Comedy-theatre hybrid with existential predilections, and Will Adamsdale in fine form at the helm”

★★★ review for The Stage.