FringeReview UK 2024

Surrender

Arcola Theatre, Hannah Farley-Hills for HFH Productions

Genre: Contemporary, Fringe Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Solo Play, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre Studio 2

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Lighting. Very remarkable lighting for Arcola’s stark Studio 2. A chair and actor. With a few changes of coat this is a stripped-down show set to transfer to Edinburgh’s Fringe; but also a stripped-down soul. Sophie Swithinbank’s new solo play Surrender, co-devised and co-directed with Phoebe Ladenburg who also acts, plays at the Arcola till July 13^th when it transfers to Summerhall in August.

Swithinbank made a huge impression with Bacon, winning four Offies in 2018. This new collaboration has been years in the making, treating of an incarcerated woman, seeing her daughter after eleven years. Why? She’s not a murderer, but the system thinks she’s something worse: an unfit mother.

This isn’t dystopia, it’s now: the way so many women – even if writer and actor have rendered ‘Mother’ unsympathetic – are failed, stigmatised, above all judged. The underlying injustice scalds like hot dissolving sugar on skin.

Ladenburg switches from confiding naturalism to switchback asides and sudden gulphs of pathos and despair as we sashay between now and eleven years back, where both progress to a revelation. Ladenburg’s mesmerising as Mother, both quicksilver and haunted, breaking out of character to eyeball or address an audience member. This will go down well at Edinburgh.

The writing rivets you, acting compels and keeps you. Both natural and memorably crafted, what’s unusual is the monologue’s poetry and verse which centre the experiential heart of the character, beyond her own questionable flights, into real ones.

The story though takes us into not just unreliable storytelling, but unreliable narrator cast in an unreliable system. One forms the other, intensifies their alienation. Mother, herself a generic reduction, a proscribed role at once conferred and withdrawn, is meeting her daughter after eleven years. She knows her sentence could finally end now, we learn, or stretch another three. Gangland murderers get less.

As Ladenburg moves about, even stands on her head (Jess Tucker Boyd‘s movement is playful and kinetic throughout), we question ourselves before we question quite why we see Ladenburg’s character as flawed as the police do. A few coat-changes, and a stark no-set in Pam Tait’s wittily unfitting attire furnishes a note of sartorial relief.

This out-of-work actor narrates how on a day when she’s auditioning for The Taming of the Shrew she makes a mistake that reels out of control and endangers her 16-month-old daughter. Quite how this happens slowly mesmerises around insomnia, lost day job, the phantasy of whether several things ever happened.

There’s unconcealed contempt for the police, and who’s fit to interrogate a woman with a child. Which doesn’t mean Mother’s not right: the police are patently wrongdoers. A moment later and Mother’s back pleading for a vape from Andreas the one “normal” person there, whom at one level she despises. This telling is classist as well as sexist: but not from the same direction.

Originally cast in iambic pentameters we’re told in an engaging preface, some sections of that survive, especially in the closing stages. Ladenburg’s own character though erupts with extreme naturalism and her narrative is studded with ripostes at imaginary interlocutors she mimics, rails at, scorns, sneers at from a classist height, sometimes melts with. Fourth-wall taunts and pleas lend a fragility and desperation as well as breaking rhythm. Evolving form is as much a character as any storytelling.

As the narrative closes, Ladenburg’s Mother invokes the tropes of Shrew, particularly “Keeper” throughout, and draws down the notion of Kate’s “surrender” as somehow the Mother internalises what she once thought of as an audition.

Another character is lighting which should be up for an award. Designer Stacey Nurse has rigged an outstanding series of intricate and dazzlingly textured effects to pinpoint narrative: a café, dim streetlight, glaring interrogation rooms, audition room and a pool of light for what seems like torture or imagination: often the same thing. A lights-up moment suggests here Arcola Studio 2 and an audience Ladenburg teases and plays with. The mingled yarn of coloured lighting at one point is breathtaking.

Dominic Brennan’s sound is less in evidence, deliberately sparing with snatches of pop standards, but striking in closed doors and one moment of vocal interaction as mother of the woman’s partner, Jean (Eleanor Wright) interacts with treacherous (or concerned) rigour.

There’s a moment five minutes before the end of this 75-minute monologue where one begins to lose focus. That’s a brief gear-change that might be adjusted. Since it transitions to the thematic heart of the piece which Swithinbank then allows to rise in iambic couplets. “Just let the ocean light inside to rest.”

That in itself provides a desperate benediction, a moment of reconciliation and as C Day Lewis once noted of his own daughter: “the love is in the letting go”. This is of that order in a very different register. The lyric entreaty though invoking Shakespeare brings in tropes we’ve not seen, like the ocean light: ”Let kite strings cutting sky fall all around/Let the wind drop, let the kite fall”.

One reading is that Swithinbank has measured the ground: Mother has flown her own kite, and out of breath with the world, lets her heart plummet to where her daughter might pick it up. Poetic invention is a daring close to such a visceral work. But the writing will snare you, Ladenburg will hold you, and you’ll lean over the  fourth wall.

Published June 27, 2024June 27, 2024 by Simon Jenner