Brighton Year-Round 2025

Lula Mebrahtu I Am – OommoO

Lula Mebrahtu

Genre: Adaptation, Biography, Contemporary, Dance and Movement Theatre, Experimental, Feminist Theatre, Fringe Theatre, Immersive, Interactive, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Show, Storytelling, Theatre, Translation, Wondrous Demonstrations

Venue: TOM The Old Market

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

“I am.”  Lula Mebrahtu’s shapeshifting show of selfhood comes with variations. Interspersed with I Am – A Walking Universe about a painful medical condition (now thankfully improved) at 2024’s Edinburgh Fringe, Mebrahtu returns with her latest incarnation of I Am – OommoO (meaning “I am one of many.”). At Brighton’s Old Market till April 6^th it tours nationally through 2025. With a coruscation of development and performance Awards – Meadows, Flipa, Braganca, Lustrum and Eclipse in 2023 – it arrives as a play of 50 minutes. With a postlude.

It’s also a show of belonging and bewildering. Asserting Eritrean/Ethiopian identity as someone now clearly a Londoner – it sashays in and out of history and the life of a young woman who likes clubbing and staving off her mother’s call for “a nice (East African) boy”, with stark home truths: like dementia. Mebrahtu too is a region in Eritrea, and though we’re not told this, there’s layers of meaning and code that urgently need teasing out.

First seen at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2023, it features Mebrahtu’s by now famous MiMu gloves: they’re wireless-operated gestural MIDI controllers. You can see the blue lights flash – these are sensors that allow the operator to multi-task: visuals, lights, sound with a delirious degree of interaction. In some venues there’s been interruptions and Mebrahtu’s resorted to cheerful manual control at the desk with two monitors. Not here: it worked perfectly and with luck all future venues have been scoped for glitches.

“Home is not brick and mortar, it is a sense of belonging.” Mebrahtu’s a magnetic stage presence and even in the stark TOM space – one shorn of any props bar visuals – she fills it with a range of singing, dance gestures and narration against the ever-shifting backdrop. Mebrahtu’s voice too is a glorious mid-range soprano able to hit high-notes with a stratospheric tessitura, and this is as much sung as acted, and at least half as much danced as either. Her command of the gloves as such is absolute. And entirely original.

As narrative it begins promisingly. There’s huge images projected of a crowd of people from  Eritrea, and at one point Mebrahtu tries getting the audience to pronounce a few words in Tigrinya. This is touching and absolutely the kind of interaction Mebrahtu should aim for (it’s not the same as her most recent) and storytelling she needs to immerse us with. But with all those visuals Mebrahtu could certainly project those words onto the screen: there was some difficulty with clarity.

I wish we could have stayed more with the Eritrea narrative. We return to it but too thinly. A journey to London, flickering moments between origins and clubbing, just to steer the narrative, would have us identify with what it’s like to enter a frankly hostile environment, wholly make it your own. Mebrahtu clearly owns her space outright. She’s exhilarating to watch, and the struggle has left her possessed, ebullient, taking no prisoners. Wanting the story as such doesn’t mean saturating with it. Mebrahtu clearly doesn’t want to make this struggle the focus: but it is something to highlight.

There’s a plangent moment when Mebrahtu’s presented with her father’s deterioration. She can’t believe it’s early-onset dementia. Soon the words “8%” filter through as the level of consciousness (I think) her father now presented. There’s some powerful graphics and later on some really affecting art images right at the end.

Though everything functions, there’s problems with vocal projection against some of the sonics: it’s been present in other venues, but TOM’s a useful placebo since it worked. Mebrahtu needs to let her voice cut through at key points of narrative, and test-run acoustics with a sound engineer/producer and/or director.

There’s some great jokes.  Of a Michael Jackson moment: “Like I know he’s kind of cancelled but you still listen to my projections so don’t judge me.” Even more of this edgy humour Mebrahtu can flick out in a moment would be welcome. I think a few might have whizzed by, though I did my best to catch them. There’s a running gag with Mebrahtu’s mother phoning just as she’s in the middle of a show, but it doesn’t quite progress. It could be a recurring killer gag. Another moment has Mebrahtu respond warmly to a “cute” man but something happens that simply isn’t clear: he musses with her hair (I think) but she’s the one thrown out of the club.

Mebrahtu’s show has clearly wowed audiences, and at 50 minutes it’s not quite a play, a one-person musical, gig, or a light show, but a concentrated hybrid vaulting everything at once. Nevertheless, it raves with ambition, and breaking a fourth, even fifth wall, Mebrahtu comments she’s had no Guardian review, and even resorts at the end to asking everyone to rate her show just then: a malice of captive reviewers! Luckily not. But Mebrahtu could learn how to vanish in a magic presence, and not fizzle out at that point.

There are classical questions for a new kind of genre. However talented, Mebrahtu needs direction and clarity, a narrative arc of just ten minutes more interspersed throughout would fix our attention. Some quieter visuals with learning the language (and a return to this), and sound synched with the moments we need to hear narration that can get lost.

Everything you’ve heard is true. Lula Mebrahtu is mesmerising, and  I Am – OommoO like its creator has vast potential. But to go further, there needs to be creative thinking ahead about how this lands: Mebrahtu knows herself. Her show must too.

Published April 7, 2025April 7, 2025 by Simon Jenner