Lauryn Redding’s Bloody Elle, A Gig Musical, is a rite of passage in more ways than one. It’s the show that reopens the Royal Exchange stage after 14 months of darkness and it marks the first production helmed by Bryony Shanahan, one of the theatre’s new directorial duo. Most of all, it tells a story of self-discovery; of a young woman falling in love, coming out, breaking up and moving on.
Described in its title as a Gig Musical, Bloody Elle is perhaps better described as a monologue with music. Amanda Stoodley’s set – a simple arrangement of tiered platforms – is dotted with mic’ stands and guitars. Redding picks up one of these guitars to accompany herself in the show’s opener, in which she introduces us to her leading character, Elle. The musical style is quickly established as she begins to build segments of voice and guitar using loop pedals, until the space is filled with sound. As the play progresses, Sound designer Alexandra Faye Braithwaite provides increasing support in engineering this layered music, giving Redding more freedom to dramatise her story.
With every character given voice and movement by Redding herself, we meet the manager of Chips and Dips, the fast food shop where Elle works, along with the other key people who shape and share her life. Most importantly we meet Eve, a young woman who seems to have taken a job alongside Elle in the chippy as much as anything to spite her family and escape her upper class life. She lives in a mansion, while Elle lives on the 10th floor of a tower block.
“They think they’re looking down on us,” Elle says, as she surveys the city from her eyrie in the home she affectionately calls Cloudrise, “but really we’re looking down on them”. It’s strongly written material that packs a big emotional and political punch, whilst at times evoking the self-deprecatory northern wit of Victoria Wood.
Eve’s eyes, the colour of guacamole, soon beguile Elle, who falls with an inevitability she doesn’t even try to resist. We know that Eve is ultimately using her as a stepping stone, as she is with everything else in her life, and the affair appears almost as brief as Eve’s short lived career in fast food. But short as it may be, the whirlwind relationship teaches Elle more about herself and the world around her than she could possibly imagine.
The disarming frankness and warmth of delivery have a lightness of touch that breezily but confidently affirm Eve’s sexual identity, with every word and action coming to her as naturally as breathing. The show punches the air in its indefatigable zest for life, and feels perfectly timed as we reach the end of Pride month and can almost taste post-lockdown freedom.
Bloody Elle was originally conceived by Redding last October, in a period of rehearsal and development at Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, culminating in a one-hour scratch performance on The Other Stage at Queen’s. In building the material into a full length show, writer and director have perhaps been a little over-ambitious in stretching it to double this original run time, because the interval, when it arrives, is beginning to feel somewhat overdue. Act II nonetheless picks up the pace a great deal and the show fairly races towards its optimistic, life-affirming conclusion.
Star Rating: Four stars
This review was originally written for and published by Musical Theatre Review
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| Production photography © Pippa Rankin |
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