Brighton Fringe 2018
Tits in Space
Katherine Hartshorne/Brigettte Wellebelove, Lovehart Productions
Genre: Comedy, Commedia dell'Arte, Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Physical Comedy, Sketch Comedy, Stand-Up, Theatre
Venue: SweetVenues The Dukebox
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Written by Brigette Wellebelove and directed by Katherine Hartshorne, the two performers, there’s a few props and a fine sound system, as well as effects supplied by the artists themselves. The Dukebox tech team supply lighting and sound management. There’s few more items like a Stop sign spinning into a north-western Library sign, and rather a lot of flying saucers. . Tits in Space is touring. First up on 13-16 June at The Space 269 Westferry Road London E14 3RS.
Review
‘Tits in Space… They’re gonna be huge’ we’re told. ‘Adult content.’ No – I’d say this was almost a family show, from Lovehart Productions Katherine Hartshorne and Brigette Wellebelove. Well, save for the lunar-projected boob hats when twin sisters dock on identical ships shaped like a silver udder and make parking docking noises.
It’s a repeat noise we’ll hear throughout this divinely goofy show, written by Wellbelove, directed by Hartshorne. They’re a couple of Plutonians sending a postcard home, to paraphrase Craig Raine’s Martian poetry collection: seeing the world at an odd angle to the universe.
It’s not though an adult one per se, and folds a sweetness into its core – not just the flying saucer sweeties and other taxable sugars we’re pelted with.
They’re the props. Apart from the spaceships and superb sound system. More of that later. The Dukebox tech team supply lighting and sound management. There’s few more items like a Stop sign spinning into a north-western Library sign as the space cadets morph into Victorian librarians, or librarians putting on a show to library-users and children about what a pair of single Victorian library ladies might look and act like. Oh, and a couple of scythes. Important, those.
The most challenging thing is to remember the year 2006, when it all happened. Pluto that celestial snowball got relegated to the status of dwarf Planet. That’s why these anti-Dwarvian Representatives from Planet Eight and a half are reminding us: what happened in 2006, well that film… And are you really comfortable with Pluto as a Dwarf Planet? That dark star of a question pulls us in like the Andromeda Galaxy dropping in for dinner (in about four billion years).
Hartshorne’s the Morecombe of the two, carrying for instance a scythe but after ten failed attempts to get someone to touch her and thus die, Death, or at least this particular death, is losing arms and ahs to eventually carry a second scythe. All her Wellebelove would-be-victims outsmart her out of sheer nervousness, repugnance or Britishness. Hartshorne’s Death is in despair. When a moment comes The Beethoven Nine Ode to Joy erupts on those speakers. Explosively.
So apart from Plutonian bafflement, we’re subjected to what they see: those time-travelling Librarians, the common figure of Death stalking with a scythe past a bus stop. Everyday things like that. There’s a French-themed striped-shirts routine, one with moustaches mimed or real, and plenty of audience participation. If you’re in the front rows of course you’ll get pelted with sweets as one does; but these performers’ reaches are long, so don’t count on safety anywhere. And there’s a lovely routine involving plankton, just in case you felt them or the sea neglected in this stellar fest. It goes swimmingly.
Most ingeniously the Plutonian misfits wishing on a planet status envisage a tie of physical emails, large slots of cardboard skapped on an email message board. Email in their world perhaps never happened, and it’s an illusion it ever happened here. Hartshorne and Wellebelove are felicitous in telling s what relaly didn’t happen. In their goofily inspired solar system, rather preferable t our own in many ways, things catch up at random. There’s the tiny issue that Pluto’s been sort of… reprieved. At least by consensus with an audience vote at Harvard where two of the three scientists argued in favour. Though that’s not official. So Hartshorne and Wellebelove have set us up as a riotous little academy. It’s just that the Ayes are meant to shout ‘Tits Rule’ and the Nos, well it’s all about Ivan. Who? Well that’s another Plutonian mystery.
Hartshorne and Wellebelove clearly bounce off each other with the eagerness of an electron in a proton bar. If Wellebelove’s the straight one, Hartshorne’s manic antics occasionally bear down on her cosmo-partner like a red giant on Wellebelove’s dwarf planet. Which is curious since they’re not that different in height. More often they’re twinned though, with a delirious, devastating innocence.
It’s still a feminist statement in several modes. It’s a world where hierarchies are subverted (all that planet/dwarf status). It refuses the seductive narratives of sex, of structure outside the multiverse on display, of gender-specific tales, of language hierarchy and techno-serfdom, designed mainly by men to enslave women. And all this implicit grammar never needing to shout anything explicit: take what you see or need.
They’re an experienced team, with straight and comedy acting roles often together, from Shakespeare to Euripides and back to this. Do look out for Lovehart’s tour dates and future shows on their website. Tits in Space is touring. First up on 13-16 June at The Space 269 Westferry Road London E14 3RS.Contact The
London E14 3RS
It takes a good deal of talent and professionalism to craft such a show that radiates charm, cunning naivety and as Rilke once put it ‘cultivating the child’s wise incapacity to understand.’ A show with a wise sweetness at its core; a brightness to cast the growing shadows out there.