This is a fine piece of theatre; it’s beautifully written and superbly presented.
Written by Madelaine Nunn and directed by Lucy Clements, it’s the story of Sam, a teenage school girl navigating what is (hopefully) the worse moments of her life. Dad has cancer and so mum has forgotten her. Her friendship circle has proven fragile. Sam is fraught and alone. Then a teacher, Mr David, begins to pay attention.
Nunn’s script is brilliantly crafted. Danger is hinted at gradually. Animal imagery lurks ominously amongst the everyday. Near Sam’s house, the ocean looms in the dark – loud, enormous, unceasing.
Sam’s teenage vernacular is pitch perfect. She has the glorious energy of youth and it’s frightening naivete.
It’s an one-actor show and performer Clare Hughes is absolutely extraordinary. Her Sam is utterly real, a spellbinding balance of brashness and vulnerability. Hughes (or is it Sam?) also evokes all the other characters; with a slight change of voice, a subtle physicality, she becomes each of the people in this young woman’s troubled world: her mother, the school counsellor, her best friend, her sick father, a gaggle of teenage girls, the loud mouth school boy – and Mr David. It’s a virtuoso performance.
Elsewhere I’ve written about the silencing of male voices in stories that indict misogyny. It’s an understandable response to the seemingly endless bellow of the patriarchy, but sometimes it can leave the female characters in a theatrical world in which their suffering seems oddly nebulous and ungrounded. By inadvertently questioning their grievances, it’s a creative decision that ironically can gaslight the very characters it aims to truthfully represent.
Nunn’s script is a thrillingly inventive response to this dilemma. Because Sam voices everyone in her world, it evokes her dreadful isolation but it also emphasises her power. Mr David and the dickhead schoolboy are heard, their brutality is noted, but this is Sam’s story, and in its telling she embodies the courage that can slay the beast.
And, in having Sam voice everyone, the piece also magically positions her for a life-altering shock. Characters she gently mocks, who elicit parody and perpetual eyerolling, burst into unexpected fullness as she discovers genuine solidarity and sisterhood. It’s deeply moving and intensely inspiring.
Paul Gilchrist
sitting, screaming by Madelaine Nunn
presented by New Ghosts Theatre Company
at Old Fitzroy Theatre until Oct 5
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 