Brighton Year-Round 2025
Flutter-Bye
A Liquorice Dragon Production
Genre: Biographical Drama, Comedic, Costume, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Interactive, Live Music, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre, Tribute Show
Venue: Ironworks Studios, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Summer 1982: a new heir to the throne’s born and we’ve heard of an air-crash. Mary packs and junks in her bedroom, lit with her past: a past suspended luridly in wigs and lurex. Despite her doolally mother’s predicting it would end in tears, that royal marriage is flourishing and so will Mary. Nothing’s crashing her world. Allison Ferns stars in Steve Barrey’s debut play Flutter-Bye directed with sound design by Jordan Langford at Studio 1 of the Ironworks Brighton. It’s a single performance of 75 minutes, returning later this year.
Since this play and Allison Ferns have a lot of legs, it’ll be worth coming back to see it run.
Review
Summer 1982: a new heir to the throne’s born and we’ve heard of an air-crash. Mary packs and junks in her bedroom, lit with her past: a past suspended luridly in wigs and lurex. Despite her doolally mother’s predicting it would end in tears, that royal marriage is flourishing and so will Mary. Nothing’s crashing her world. But what Mary’s unpacking is what past made her fill those costumes: a singer who once made it to Opportunity Knocks stardom. And? Allison Ferns stars in Steve Barrey’s debut play Flutter-Bye directed with sound design by Jordan Langford at Studio 1 of the Ironworks Brighton. It’s a single performance of 75 minutes, returning later this year.
Award-winning radio presenter Ferns is a starry name in Sussex showbiz. Featuring in pantos, taking theatre and film roles (her head’s visible in Bridget Jones’s Diary!), this is still her debut in a straight play: a solo one at that. And you wonder, as Ferns impersonates Mary impersonating Sixties stars, where on earth Ferns has been for the last decade or so. Well, on radio mostly. She burns through Barrey’s debut play, makes Mary not only relatable, but details the fractured arc of her life with wit, panache, enormous affect – and torches those songs.
What’s Mary leaving? We continually reel back to Ferns de-railing her life as she skims off costume after costume from the rails. Quite late on – it could start earlier – Ferns relates her recent careering: ‘Tina Turn-On’, ‘Nancy Soon After’, ‘Shirley Sassy’ and most of all, ‘Busty Springfield’, the singer Mary feels closest to. You might imagine what she performs, at the Ship Hotel.
But each of these bears back something of Mary, as Ferns blazes through a mimicry not just of voice but often of passion. There’s a hint of Philippa Stanton the legendary real-life mimic of so any singers, whom her friend Charlotte Jones wrote a play for (The Diva In Me). Ferns is winning, sourcing local guffaws back too – that 49 bus back east, those clubs. That radio interactivity too makes short work of fourth walls splintering as Ferns works the audience, shimmies through rows and corners as she sings, waits to go onstage in Opportunity Knocks or the Ship. What could possibly go wrong?
Cue vulnerable family members coming together like explosive chemical compounds at the high-point of Mary’s life and we’re in tailspin. A parallel narrative makes Mary’s a dutiful trudge: bringing up brothers to bringing up her mother, who works at Iceland but never owns a freezer. Strange transitions bring Mary to visit bank incomprehension in a hospital. And what did happen to her father?
From soaring on the tinsel wings of stardom from Brighton clubs, to gulphs of despair back in seedier clubs than she started with, Ferns zig-zags in Barrey’s narrative. We start and end in 1982, scroll back to 1968, the cusp of incipient stardom and the pivotal point of Mary’s life; and even briefly flick by to Christmas 1961 for a first early-teen night on the tiles. Elsewhere the chronology’s not as signposted as it could be: the two radio announcements might have come together (ably dispatched by Brian Capron, one of several voiceovers deployed).
Apparently abandoned by their father, a mother with incipient dementia leaves Mary the early parent of her younger brothers. Dependable Charlie soon makes out, but blond Jonny is more vulnerable, more uncertain as he tries punching his way through life’s paper bag. Mary confronts chiaroscuro moments that snuffed her spotlight and left her following long, loping shadows.
As Mary’s world literally unspools around her, there’s a tape to discover, a history to ravel back, and just maybe a fast-forward snag from no-one.
There’s a fine range of voiceovers other than Capron’s. Mary’s Irish Mother (Elizabeth Hennessy), and more fleetingly, vulnerable brother Jonny (Jack Pallister) and Mary Father’s (Steve Barrey) at the end. Lighting tech (Ironworks) is well-defined, and Sound here works well, though background music needs fining down. Profits go to the Dementia Choir through work with Liquorice Dragon’s ambassador Angela Lonsdale; and a Raffle at the end won someone a five-course dinner for four at Etch.
A promising, appealing vehicle for Ferns who’s raised this show to a riveting night out, this play with music needs adjusting. Chronological clarity on occasion, an earlier introduction to songs to let the emotion explode. A moment of drag two-thirds through ably covered by Ferns is one symptom where a tautening of structure’s needed: for instance placing the two radio announcements together to clarify the year and remind people of the opening (some reported to me they’d forgotten it and it’s important not to). There’s a fine twist at the end. Since this play and Ferns have a lot of legs, it’ll be worth coming back to see it run.
