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Brighton Year-Round 2025

‘The Voyage of the Carcass’ and ‘Bobby & Amy’

B.L.T.

Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Brighton Little Theatre, 9 Clarence Gardens, Brighton.

Festival:


Low Down

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you.”

 

Those lines appear in ‘The Waste Land’, and in the Notes, T. S. Eliot tells us that they were inspired by an account of Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions, where – ‘it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.’

The human mind is very adept at creating a version of ‘reality’ that seems to make sense.  We take some elements of what surrounds us and discard others, to stitch together something that appears believable.  It’s how theatre works, too – we choose to ignore the audience in the seats next to us, and the lights hanging above the stage, and believe ourselves to be watching real events taking place in a drawing room, or a castle … or a sailing ship trapped in the ice near the North Pole.

Review

In the first play of Brighton Little Theatre’s double-bill it’s a sailing ship, the Carcass; and she’s been stuck there, icebound, for the last seven years.   We found ourselves in the main cabin, minimally sketched in with a porthole on the rear wall, a hanging lamp over the table, and Beverly Grover’s lighting design giving us the bluish rays streaming through an overhead grating from  the deck above.

 

We first meet the expedition’s leader, Bane Barrington, a typical Edwardian adventurer who might be from New York (or maybe not …).  James Bennison played him as a rather shady individual, switching among a variety of accents and backgrounds.  He’s reminiscing about his beloved (he stresses the ‘ed’ to pronounce it ‘belovED’)  fiancee Eliza, back home, but he’s sharing the space with Elijah Kane, the ship’s chaplain.

 

Kane has the long black robes of a man of God, along with a gentleman’s black moustache – but Esther Dracott as Kane quickly unclips the ‘tache and morphs into Eliza, giving Bane Barrington a well deserved knee in his goolies.  I feel I can use a word like ‘goolies’ as it’s completely in the spirit of the production.  This show is bonkers.

 

Bonkers – there’s slapstick, murderous violence involving an ice axe (don’t ask …), and a lot of bizarre juxtapositions in Dan O’Brien’s script.  There’s a third character, but he’s completely off his trolley – or should I say ‘Sled’? (perhaps the right word is ‘sledge’, though – there’s a big argument about this later).   He’s Israel the Bosun, who Samuel Masters plays without any words until late in the show, when he has lots to say.  He’s referred to by name as ‘Izzie’, allowing a running gag where it’s understood as a question – “Is he?”. 

 

Bonkers, as I said.  And very funny.  I don’t want to spoil it for you so I won’t mention the fact that they’ve eaten the forty crew members and all the sled dogs (or sledge dogs – you decide …).      They’ve been trying to reach the North Pole, but they are up against another explorer called Bjorn Bjornson, who they don’t actually meet until the play’s closing scenes.  

 

Or maybe not.  It’s very possible that all of this is taking place in Bane Barrington’s head – a result of the extreme mental and physical hardships he’s suffered over the two thousand, five hundred and eighty two days he tells us he’s been on the boat – he has recorded them, day by day, in his journal.

 

Looks like Shackleton was on to something when he talked about one extra person on ‘the white road’ … what an evocative metaphor for the seemingly endless arctic wastes.

 

Back in Brighton Little Theatre, though, we were given a whole host of people as the cast of ‘Bobby & Amy’ – over two dozen, as I remember, though there may well have been more.

All inhabitants of a sleepy Cotswold town; from Jim who runs the fish and chip shop to Mr Patel the pharmacist and the posh lady who has a riding academy.   

 

The genius of this production is that the entire panoply of people is played by just two actors – Izzy Boreham as Amy and Jimmy Schofield as Bobby.  They morph from character to character by changing just their accent or their body language – no different costumes or props.  Sometimes they even do this in mid-conversation, so that, for instance, Amy can be talking to her mother, and we get both sides of the dialogue just from Boreham on her own.   I mentioned at the beginning how theatre asks us to ‘see’ only what we need to, to make sense of the story; and here the changes were done with such skill that we had no sense of artifice – there was a scene, and then our perspective gave a jump, and we were somewhere else.  

 

Such a range of characters and settings in Emily Jenkins’ beautifully written play – all done so believably that I could build the locations in my mind’s eye.  I truly cannot remember seeing a production that carried this off as seamlessly as Boreham and Schofield managed.  It was a masterclass in acting technique, and of course credit must also go to director Sam Chittenden for the staging and blocking.

 

The story centres on Amy and Bobby, two thirteen-year-olds who, although they live in the village, are seen as ’different’ in that tribal way that teenagers have.   Amy’s father has died, so her mother’s on her own (though later we meet Mum’s rather creepy new man);  while it quickly becomes apparent that Bobby’s autistic.  “I like numbers – numbers are SAFE”    Amy initially thinks Bobby’s “Odd” (influenced by her nasty classmates) but she soon realises that he has a lot of profound insights and kindness, and the pair become close friends. They’re the kind that look after each other: giving support and protection against the school bullies and the difficulties of finding paid work.

 

The action is set in the nineties – a world, as the programme puts it, of “sunshine, Take That and Tamagotchis”.    But the rural idyll is destroyed by the Foot and Mouth epidemic, which required the slaughter and burning of whole herds of cows.  When we heard that they’d burned Abigail, a cow that Amy and Bobby had helped to raise from a calf, I had difficulty suppressing a tear.  The cattle were destroyed, along with the hopes and the  traditional way of life of the farmers and of the town’s inhabitants.    A sobering tale – one that I won’t forget in a hurry.

 

We’d been given two very contrasting productions, ones that play with our sense of what constitutes reality – in different ways.    An intriguing, thought-provoking evening.   Try to catch it – you won’t be disappointed.

 

 

 

 

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