Brighton Fringe 2025
The Leonora Banquet
The Writer's Mark
Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Experimental, Installation Theatre, Surrealism
Venue: The Regency Town House
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
The Writer’s Mark has hit on a highly original concept; exploring Surrealist writers’ legacies, what they leave behind and how this can be interpreted through physical theatre, art, mime, text and ensemble.
Third in a series following Franz Kafka and Antonin Artuad, The Leonora Banquet brings three stories vividly to life.
It’s a life that canters through a landscape from rural Lancashire, to Paris and a love affair with Max Ernst, an asylum in Madrid, New York and more until settling in Mexico where she thrived as artist and activist until her death at 94.
Produced and directed by Natasha Higdon with a strong team of volunteer contributing artists and creatives, on this viewing it is work deserved of support with scope for national collaboration with galleries and presenters.
Review
There are artists who find their style and more or less stick to it, think Piet Mondrian, and those that keep trying new forms of expression, notably Picasso. In Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), we have the perpetual seeker. Her work encompasses intricate painting, sculptural mask making, lithographs, jewellery, tapestry and, most importantly here, writing. Like her near contemporary and fellow Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, she only became famous retrospectively; oh, they happen to be women.
For her latest piece of exploratory theatre, The Writer’s Mark director Natasha Higdon delves into three of Carrington’s lesser known short stories creating a physicalised dream-world through movement, text and image. The splendid Regency Town House – an artwork in itself – becomes a gallery reflecting Carrington’s extraordinary life and work in collaboration with eight female visual artists. It’s a life that canters through a landscape from rural Lancashire, to Paris and a love affair with Max Ernst, an asylum in Madrid, New York and more until settling in Mexico where she thrived as artist and activist until her death at 94.
Choosing three stories allows Higdon to use the spaces of the house and the skills of the four-strong cast coherently and with repeating themes to build a strong picture of Carrington’s internal world.
The opening story ‘House of Fear,’ a collaboration with Ernst, is fittingly performed in room decorated with large, playful ‘Exquisite Corpse’ drawings. Danced in tight, embodied choreographic sequences (Stephanie Preito Trincado and Lexi Quintana particularly strong) we hear from a girl who finds herself “around noon” in a world inhabited by speaking horses with mysterious abilities. Tahsina Rijwana Choudhury and Beatrice Cupido complete the neatly matched ensemble, revolving roles between them. They are a mass of dark hair flashing against white shirts in Lindsay Miduk and Higdon’s stylish period-esque costumes.
The stories blend into each other through key gestures and a gentle out-blowing of breath. Animals are everywhere, predominantly horses, as is food (as befits a banquet) and extreme cold which permeates the narrative and perhaps explains the artist settling in Mexico. There is terror here too, and transformation; a need to escape. Fascinating vocal music backs the action from a portable speaker and accompanies our journey upstairs where, under Jo Gabrielle Sheppard’s beautifully evocative willow sculpture, around miniature object ladened tables, the next two stories are conjured before us. ‘A Man in Love’ is a dark tale of love and death, centred on the withering Agnes embraced by mannequin arms. Amanda Davidson’s dinky marionette stars as ‘The Oval Lady’ in the final tale, perhaps the most autobiographical, in which a young girl is restrained by an overbearing father who defies her playing with friends or horses. It’s the only episode to benefit in clarity from a recorded narration, ably voiced by Higdon.
Whilst strong on the uncanny and often bitter undercurrents of Carrington’s writing the piece is less effective at conveying the humour within much of her work; Agnes’ husband for example has the ability to dry out meat by looking at it – has he inadvertently dried out Agnes?
If, like someone telling you their dream, the stories’ twists and turns go on a bit too long and more variation of tone would be welcome, The Leonora Banquet illuminates its subject in a fittingly surreal way. The appearance of one Carrington’s fabulous mask heads is a startling end to a stimulating event.
