FringeReview UK 2024

Stitches

Jonathan Blakeley Sarah Lawrie

Genre: Comedic, Contemporary, Drama, Fringe Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre

Venue: Hope Theatre, Islington

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

If David Eldridge was a teddy bear, this is what he’d sound like. Admittedly he’d be tanked up on Red Bull too. Directed by Samantha Pears, Jonathan Blakeley performs his own Stitches at the Hope Theatre, Islington till March 9^th. It’s one of the most blisteringly-performed and sweetly eloquent one-person plays now on in London.

Produced by actor Sarah Lawrie, who has a nose for edgy one-person shows but also produced Finborough’s Canadian political three-hander 1979 at the Finborough last month, it’s a 70-minute immersion: in a teddy’s love for baby Chloe. Chosen by Chloe’s grandmother, this teddy bonds from birth onwards.

Blakeley’s button-holing the audience with his own buttons and stitches recalls one of those narratives where a non-human eyes up its master or mistress and pines somewhat: Virginia Woolf’s Flush seen through Elizabeth Barratt-Browning’s spaniel, is the most famous.

In adopting a sharp-shirted Essex barrow-boy out of Eldridge’s Market Boy or In Basildon, say, Blakeley both edges a baffled vulnerability at times, and eschews cuteness. Paddington he ain’t. More teddy boy.

Often downstage (can there be one at the diminutive Hope? Yes) Blakeley engages with the horseshoe’d audience, shakes hands, throws out pseudo-insults or joshes and generally vaults about as if he’s just had a couple of Duracells painfully inserted, in Charlotte Taylor’s boppy movement. Alternating with moments of almost eerie stillness.

Though Bear can’t communicate save to other bears, he’s wise beyond his factory setting as he blasts forth with anything up to c-words and streetwise warnings to little Chloe.

Blakeley quaintly scrunches his stomach and extends his hand: his love, which isn’t anything it shouldn’t be, is total: ”You and me, Chloe. You and me.” You hear the blokeish tenderness more than Chloe’s Dad with his dad CDs allowed one spin, in the car-lift up to uni. But does Chloe always return that?

Constance Villemot’s set (a seat-box and props) and ear-Bear-inflected costume might seem simple, but the team behind this production is high-tech and formidable. Villemot’s video design is selective, with backdrops of churches but also mobile ones of anything from washing machine interiors to other swirling fast-forwards. They don’t distract and aren’t over-used.

From the start the selection of room colour ushers in Mattis Larsen’s striking and active lighting, a real highlight. Hatti North’s sound though often confined to ambient pop-songs and narrative, sports key moments composed by Thomas West.

In the latter stages the sheer quiet and birdsong heralds a different tempo, and you see too how Blakeley’s narrated everything from childhood to first-year parties at the frantic rate of growth. But after a screeching pause, the whole production, and Blakeley’s delivery, shifts.

Chloe’s parent-sundered childhood with a church interlude and brief glimpse of wonder at singing, adolescence, score-charts for boys (projected) and rough first sex, betrayal, up to uni and another floppy-haired (deleted) is spun through 50 minutes.

There’s a tumbling gear-change, and for a moment it’s not entirely clear from the video projection if Chloe’s life is interrupted by a devastatingly bad acid-trip rendering her long-term speechless, or something else. It’s soon clear it’s something else. Chloe and Bear have been separated for years, he locked in a cupboard and stealing mere glimpses.

The end’s both poignant and visionary. A show to remember long after the batteries run down. And a poignant moment too, to reflect on the Hope’s apparently imminent closure (as theatre) after June, unusually and catastrophically, due not to funds but artistic differences

Published February 29, 2024February 29, 2024 by Simon Jenner