Brighton Fringe 2017
Wet Bread
Sheer Drop Theatre
Genre: Comedy, Contemporary, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Solo Performance, Theatre
Venue: Sweet Venues Waterfront 1
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Tom Glover’s one-woman play Wet Bread centres on Adele, relentless fighter of apparently lost left or green causes, protester against everything. Beautifully directed by Tom Latter Morag Sims stars in this wondrously acted piece. Richard Bell’s sound, set by Emma Robinson and Sarah Sweet consisting of placards and a megaphone technically cued to perfection by Katy Brecht is notable.
Review
Tom Glover’s one-woman play Wet Bread centres on Adele, relentless fighter of apparently lost left or green causes, protester against everything, Corbynite who finds the Labour Party too doctrinaire. What’s Left must be right. But the country’s voted, Right. In fact she rips up a lot of cards if not causes in this beautifully-directed – by Tom Latter – wondrously acted piece. Richard Bell’s sound, set by Emma Robinson and Sarah Sweet consisting of placards and a megaphone technically cued to perfection by Katy Brecht is notable. There are many cues and noises-off, and Morag Sims not only synchs herself but a battery of voices: her locally-sourced mother, snappy sister, plummy Penny, nice county Sue, Glasgow drunken homeless, burring old buffer from middle England she first annoys; Sims accents and frowns everyone into life. This is a tour de farce with heart.
There’s a an excruciatingly funny scene where she’s given her niece a goat, but it’s actually for an African boy. ‘He’s stolen it, Africans steal’ her niece intones infuriated. Adele sees the world in its issue-based starkness. Dared by her sister to change the world in a year or give up (not that she ever will) Adele, hard-voice and incredulous the world doesn’t see it her way, argufies her way in and out of Corbyn’s Labour having militated for Milliband, Remainer in Brexit, the NHS, offers her home to a drunk, deals increasingly with the fact that she’s not dealing with her mothers cancer (nice fox hunting but Remainer Sue does that), anti-fracking with all the F-word jokes, each lighting up her failures as a person rather endearingly. We can’t dislike Adele and warm to her. she’s Everycampaigner, an amalgam of impossible people who can’t quite exist, we think… And that drunk brings home truth to Adele in bottles an bottled truth.
Even Simon not a vegetarian but so right-on he teaches her things about the food she’s eating (flow thousands of miles, salve-reared and so forth) but that meat, no, pretend you’ve someone else. Adele mimes this running in tandem with her sister for a charity fighting cancer with one of those relentless cheerleaders from Retail who have a good vacuous heart. Adele will have none of it.
So what happens to Robin and indeed Simon? The year? There’s a heart-warming end to this, where everything even the megaphone comes into play. It brings a real lump to the throat. And the title? What we have in common to like or loathe? Again, Adele’s your port of call. Do catch this! Sims puts on the best single act of a whole cast I’ve seen in a long time.
