Brighton Fringe 2025

Tip Of Your Tongue

Split Hairs

Genre: Drama, Experimental, Fringe Theatre, Horror, Multimedia

Venue: The Rotunda Theatre Bubble. Regency Square, Brighton BN1 2FG

Festival: Brighton Fringe

Low Down

Review

Watching ‘Tip of YourTongue’ was quite a dreamlike experience – shadows flitted in front of us; images of people grew and shrank as we watched; a beautiful woman met a mysterious individual who was by turns intriguing, attractive and terrifying – and all to the intermittent sound of a violin; sometimes bowed, sometimes plucked – occasionally filling the theatre space, and at other moments hovering just on the very threshold of hearing …

And on my way home, I couldn’t get ‘Native New Yorker’ out of my head.  Odyssey’s song from 1977 is all about life in New York – “You should know the score by now” – and this production was drenched in references to the place.  Yellow cabs, hot-dog vendors, traffic along the Avenues making you dodge, a New York radio station, singers in small clubs.   They were all conjured up as kaleidoscopic fragments of sound and of physical theatre by the cast members, and they created a vivid sense of the place, even though in reality we were sat in a bubble tent in Brighton.   It’s directed by Robert McCloskey, but written and workshopped by the whole Company.

The basic scenario is that a nightclub singer (Zoë Alexander) is heading home in a taxi when they run into a man (Jamie Izzet) in a black fedora, who’s crossing the street without looking.  He’s not badly hurt, but won’t go to the hospital, so the woman insists that she takes him back to his apartment.

‘It’s the thought you had in a taxi cab that got left on the curb‘

Once they are in the Man’s apartment, he insists that he’s physically uninjured, but the Woman feels that the incident is somehow her fault, and she’s so filled with guilt that she’s exhausted and finally falls asleep – whereupon the Man gently covers her with a blanket.  In doing so, of course, he hides her from the audience.

So far, it’s a classic romcom opening –

‘Music plays, everyone’s dancin’ closer and closer

Makin’ friends and findin’ lovers‘

But the ‘Split Hairs’ company have produced something much more profound.  The Rotunda stage had a central flat to cover entrances and exits, flanked on either side by large white fabric panels, taller than a person and translucent –  thin enough that anything lit from behind would cast a shadow onto the screen.

So after the Woman falls asleep downstage, in normal stage light – we see her shadow behind the screen (because she’s moved there, without us seeing), and the Man is able to approach her from the front side of the screen, and gently kiss her. 

Kissing a shadow.  Beautiful.  Dreamlike.  And a perfect metaphor for their relationship.  The Woman soon makes it clear that she finds the Man attractive, but he seems unable to reciprocate the emotion.   In scene after scene, the Man comes close to declaring his love, but can never quite get the words out.  

They seem stuck – on the tip of his tongue …

Shadow play theatre is a very ancient art form.  It has a long history in Southeas Asia, especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia.   The Split Ends company have made brilliant use of it in this production, with Seb Nicolas’s lighting design transposing the settings to New York.   So when the Woman explains that she’s a singer in a club, one of the side panels lights up and we see her shadow moving as she performs one of her numbers – to the accompaniment of the chorus and music (Sara Engeli, Cody Thacker, and Cleo Quesne on violin)

Later, she’s in bed in her own apartment – “I dreamed of you the other night …” and we can see small shadows of sheep circling above her head.  Witty as well as very graphic.   The animals were tiny models, but at other times some of the cast held their limbs close to the lamp and far from the screen, creating huge shadows of hands and arms which seemed to reach out for the Woman, in her disturbingly dream-filled sleep.

Very Freudian.  In fact the whole production might well have actually been a dream – there were scenes where the actors crammed themselves into a large wicker laundry basket, and others where the Woman was illuminated solely by light reflected off a mirror.  On a number of occasions the Man or the Woman examined their faces at great length, staring into mirrors.   Sigmund would have been enchanted by the concept.

Very Freudian indeed.  The Woman constantly worries about, and keeps losing, her coat (is this about anxiety?), while the laundry basket would surely make any therapist turn their session to the concept of ‘dirty linen’ …

Then there’s the Man himself.  He seems emotionally blocked, as I said earlier, and his face is marked with some kind of scars that the Woman keeps trying to remove.   At one point he appears to threaten her, and she backs away in terror, across the stage, while huge hands reach for her on the screen.  

Is the Man real?  Or is he, instead, a projection of the Woman’s desires and fears?    Was the whole thing a dream?  The meaning of this intriguing production remained unclear – though that didn’t stop the Rotunda audience from being gripped.   

I dreamed about them that night.  Try to catch the show and they’ll probably inhabit your dreams, too.

Published May 25, 2025May 25, 2025 by Strat Mastoris