Brighton Fringe 2024
Dawn Again: A Rap Opera
Cloudy Productions
Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Opera and Operatic Theatre, Slapstick Comedy, Theatre
Venue: Rotunda Theatre: Bubble
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
This romp in rap is a fun and entertaining hour. Elliot, hapless, in trouble, is surrounded by more capable women – but two are giving birth to his babies simultaneously, and the midwife has her own opinions (trenchantly expressed). Just add in a toxic lech of a Tory MP and a colourful grandma and you’re all set.
Review
Dawn Again is an intriguing mix of rap and farce, funny, entertaining, with political asides – a very engaging piece, that gets the audience on its side despite some technical hitches with the radio mics. One of the great things about rap is the way that you can emphasis a plot point, a personal point or anything else you’d like to highlight, using the rhyme and rhythm. The music and pace that this engenders propelled the narrative along in a satisfying way, the audience was along for the journey.
And journey it was. The basic plot of the rather inadequate political advisor who had two pregnant girlfriends in the same hospital having babies on the same day – no spoilers here, it’s in the blurb – gets a twist or two along the way which are great fun. The production’s heart is the right place – hapless maybe how the main character is described on the poster, but the midwife had a stronger description. Rap really lets you end on and emphasise expressions like “what a dick you are” – though her expressions were more cutting and colourful.
Once the performance has really got going, there is a hilarious, central scene of pure farce, with characters whizzing in and out of the curtains that surround hospital beds. The cast maintain the tempo with some quite difficult changes of costume and character.
There are some great cameo scenes – in a bit of backstory telling of how Elliot met one of the women on a plane, while she is anxiously searching for her crystals to “help the plane take off”, one of the cast is busy doing the flight attendant semaphore thing – it’s a nice visual joke in itself that adds texture and interest to the scene.
It is all rap more or less – sometimes they lost the beat a bit, but it still worked to carry the play along. I did feel however that when there were two characters on stage it would have been better if they had faced the audience, certainly at the more important points. The rap sometimes became swallowed up between two people interacting with each other and lost the contact with audience just a little. But in this production, although it just lost a little energy at times, the audience were always rooting for the cast.
The play had six characters all with well delineated identities and comic quirks, and at its best the cast were bouncing off one another, energetically rapping at each other. In a way it was an uneasy premise to work with – it could have been a much darker production, but it balanced out the comedy and the farce with the quite difficult morality involved very well – nobody who deserved our disapproval got off the hook, and there was enough roundedness and development in the characters to make them believable as well as funny. All in all, it was a terrific ensemble performance.
