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Fringe Online 2021

I am all the Rooms of the House

A RADA Festival Homemakers Commission

Genre: Fringe Theatre, Poetry-Based Theatre

Venue: Manchester Home

Festival:


Low Down

We begin on the outside of a house as our narrator is about to enter. From their entrance into the house, we are given a number of visuals that accompany the poetry around the descriptions of what is in the house. Split at times between an abandoned house and one fit for habitation, the musings are cleverly interspersed with the observations and guidance relevant to our narrator’s point of view.

Review

From the very beginning I was totally engaged in this. The visuals were enticing and made for a quick and easy beginning. Currently we may all be seeing too much of four walls, but this did manage to make art out of them. The script, the poetry, is just sublime as it guided us through the house with ease and beauty. Our narrator, and writer, and performer, Hester Ullyart, pulls off something very difficult – to manage to do the writing and the performing with equal aplomb.

Highlights included the dancing in the kitchen, the bathroom and the exits and entrances. Who would have thought that after a year or so of lockdown I could be engaged in someone else’s house in such a way?

The cleverness too of having an abandoned house part of the narrative was that it allowed questions. We questioned what would have been there before – the history of joy or pain, the indication that under the grime may have been love or conflict and how it serves to remind us of our own special and precious spaces.

The sound quality certainly helped and with the ability to tenderly describe, through varying tones and emotion it became a gentle night swept into our ears, rather than an attempt to describe something we may not have experienced before: the familiar made new. The relaxed nature of what was being spoken gave confidence and pleasure in equal measure.

This is a piece of art that has left an indelible impression on me as I run from one part of the house to another to do not much more than what was done yesterday and will possibly be repeated the day after. It worked incredibly well, and I found it truly to be a piece of lockdown art that understood the form, played with its audience and provided an entertaining distraction for the 30 minutes or so we watched.

Published