Section:GDN 12 PaGe:13 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 16:12 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian
Thursday 8 August 2019 13
Live reviews
PHOTOGRAPHS: ANDREW PERRY; MURDO MACLEOD/THE GUARDIAN; CHRIS CHRISTODOLOU/BBC
Do (sexual assault, sexual self-
loathing), he presents himself as
a disturbed soul, fi nding solace in
Martha’s attraction to him. At every
turn, he makes the wrong call on
how to deal with the danger she
poses. At points in this dance of
desperate co dependency, they seem
(almost) as bad as each other.
Until they’re not: Martha
outstrips our worst expectations.
She doorsteps him, comes to his
gigs, abuses his partner. She sends
41,000 emails in three years. The
police make things worse, forcing
Gadd to trawl through hours of
hateful voicemails in search of a
criminal threat. The show, above
all, is an appeal for better protection
against harassment of this kind.
Having robbed us of the closure that
Gadd’s award- win once supplied,
Baby Reindeer off ers none of its
own, as the story is brought up
to date and into the venue. It’s a
haunted, haunting hour.
Brian LoganProms
BBCSO/
Stasevska
I
f you followed Richard
Gadd ’s career up to his
Edinburgh comedy award-
winning Monkey See
Monkey Do three years
ago, you might think he’d
had his lifetime’s fi ll of trauma
and, happily, it had culminated in
that cathartic triumph. Among its
several startling achievements,
Baby Reindeer leaves that notion
in tatters. Gadd’s solo theatre
debut recounts his horrifying – and
apparently true – experiences with astalker. Six years ago, he fl irted with
Martha when she propped up the
bar where he worked. If that mistake
didn’t quite prove fatal, it was the
next worst thing.
Baby Reindeer – his tormentor’s
name for Gadd – narrates the
relationship. We never see Martha:
she’s represented by a bar-
stool. But we hear her voicemail
messages, and her emails scroll
across the venue’s ceiling. We’re
played testimonies from the saga’s
collaterally damaged: Gadd’s
parents, partner, landlady. Perhaps
it starts at too overheated a pitch- after all, we ain’t seen nothing
yet – but Jon Brittain’s production
tightens its grip with terrible
inexorability, and Gadd performs it
as if living the horror afresh.
What elevates – or lowers - the story beyond the level of
victim narrative is Gadd’s initial
complicity in the abuse. With
reference to the experiences
described in Monkey See Monkey
T
his was Dalia
Stasevska ’s debut as
the BBC Symphony
Orchestra’s new
principal guest
conductor – an
appointment that makes her the fi rst
woman to hold a titled conducting
post at a major London orchestra.
The players’ responsiveness
to her suggests a strong rapport
already developing; the silence in
a packed Royal Albert Hall at the
end of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony
No 6 suggests that she can hold anaudience in her hand just as surely.
It had been the bleakest of endings
to a stirring performance of the
symphony, spirited and with a few
edges left raw, its dark moments
made more vivid by the BBCSO
players’ grittiness.
Opening the concert, Sibelius’s
Karelia Suite had likewise sounded
familiar yet fresh, the middle
movement fl uid and pensive,the outer ones skipping along,
feet barely touching the ground,
the orchestra always ready to
move when Stasevska whipped
things up.
Between these two there was
something new, at least for London
audiences: the Cello Concerto by
Mieczysław Weinberg, a more richly
lyrical work than you might expect
from the musically proscriptive
USSR of the 1950s. Sol Gabetta, who
has recently been its champion,
shaped the fi rst movement into one
long, slowly blossoming melody,
and whirled through the livelier
passages, even if the orchestra didn’t
always share her urgency. The return
to the opening music at the end was
movingly done.
Her encore – Casals’s haunting
arrangement of a Catalan folk song,
for which she was joined by three
of the BBCSO cellists – was further
proof that even the Albert Hall can
feel like an intimate venue if the
performer gets it right.
Erica JealB
ehind Travis
Alabanza is a
container full of
cardboard boxes,
each lined with
pink tape. In front,
a box to put a burger in. “Do you
feel boxed in?” they ask (Alabanza
prefers the pronoun they). By the
end of this humane and heart-
rending show, they will have forced
their way through the roof of the
container – literally thinking outside
the box. “To be unregulated is to be
dangerous,” they say.
The impetus for the show, and
the reason Alabanza has called
an audience member on stage to
help them make a burger, was an
incident in 2016 when an unknown
assailant threw a burger at them in
a transphobic attack. Alabanza tries
to reconcile themselves with this
random act of violence by taking
control of the off ending weapon. Like
claiming a term of abuse and making
it a badge of pride, there could,
perhaps, be something empowering
about learning the thickness of the
bap, the spiciness of the meat and
the size of the container. They think
it’s worth a try, if only to dispel the
memory of a meaningless attack.
Much of this is very funny.
Although fragile, Alabanza is witty
and confi dent, feeding off the
audience like a seasoned cabaret
star. They generate roars of laughter,
but the angry and intelligent script
is also underscored with the real
pain of exclusion, of being boxed
in, of being trapped in a world
where sexual and racial violence is
prevalent and too often tolerated.
For all the fun and games of early
morning drinks and ham fi sted onion
chopping, there is little to be gained
from mastering the burger. The
threat of being pointed at, heckled
and assaulted remains. So they go
from fast-food poetry to Crackerjack
cookery and on to great tirades of
fury, pleading for a society in which
marginalised people don’t have to go
on stage to let their voices be heard
and where passers by do not simply
pass by when someone’s human
dignity is denied.
Mark FisherTheatre
Baby Reindeer
★★★★☆
Summerhall, EdinburghUntil 25 August★★★★☆
Royal Albert Hall, LondonTheatre
Bystanders
★★★★☆
Summerhall, EdinburghUntil 25 AugustS
omeone at Cardboard
Citizens has noticed
a pattern. It’s no
surprise that a company
dedicated to the
homeless is sensitive
to the increase in rough sleeping,
the product of austerity. But what
Bystanders highlights is an equally
alarming attitudinal shift – and it
is one that dehumanises the very
people suff ering most from the cuts.
In Adrian Jackson ’s gutsy,
ferociously acted production, Jake
Goode, Libby Liburd, Mark Lockyer
and Andre Skeete jump back and
forth between scenes, reminding
us of the way homelessness has
become a bit-part player in the news
cycle, as if it is now an acceptable
part of everyday life.
There is the story broken by
the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman
about former boxer Vernon Vanriel ,
stranded in Jamaica for 13 years
where he lived in a shack without
electricity. His experience was
central in the Windrush scandal.
Then there was Tomek, the
Polish man living on the streets in
Benidorm where he was allegedly
paid €100 by a British stag party to
have the groom’s name tattooed
on his forehead. And in Salisbury,
Charlie Rowley, who picked up the
poisoned perfume bottle discarded
by Russian spies, giving it to Dawn
Sturgess as a tragic gift.
These stories betray a troubling
level of callousness, especially when
supplemented with the story of
the police offi cers who deposited
Eugeniusz Niedziolko in a public
toilet so as not to trouble A&E. Call
it a drunken prank, call it sloppy
espionage , call it the consequence
of stretched resources ... the result
is the demonisation and death of
society’s most vulnerable.
Bystanders is a memorial to the
fallen in the war of attrition on
our streets. A list of names of the
homeless dead is passed around
to underscore the point that these
were people, not just bleak statistics.
Remarkably, the production itself
manages not to be grim, just
pugnacious, political and urgent.
Mark Fisher★★★★☆
Traverse, EdinburghUntil 25 AugustTheatre
Burgerz
Haunted ...
Richard Gadd
in Baby ReindeerFunny and fragile ...
Travis Alabanza
in BurgerzFerociously acted ...
Andre Skeete
in BystandersSpirited stuff ...
Dalia Stasevska
conducts the BBCSOРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS