Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, this is a gritty, bold production set in a women’s prison – and performed in a very small, intimate theatre space. This is almost punk rock Shakespeare, and occasionally it has some punk rock in it. If the Pussy Riot reference poster doesn’t clue you in already: this is a production with guts.

Julius Caesar isn’t a play I’ve studied in much depth, and I know plenty of other reviewers will do a better academic job, so I’m going to focus on what I liked about it:

1. More parts to female actors! Hooray! Also, the production necessitates a certain degree of queer/genderqueer acceptance, as both Brutus and Caesar’s wives play a significant part in the story. Get on board and get on with the plot.
2. The initial prison set-up is ingenious, and really adds a few layers for the first half – Caesar is a much-loved but bullying top dog in the setting. And one of the first things Frances Barber’s Caesar does when she comes on stage is smooch Mark Anthony (Cush Jumbo). Whoa! That makes… a lot of sense, actually, and adds a brilliant ambiguity to the characters’ different declarations of love for each other.
3. Did I mention punk rock? There’s a bit of live music with a drumkit on wheels used to brilliant effect.
4. The soothsayer is presented as the clearly-slightly-unhinged inmate who is usually seen carrying a doll and with her hair always in bunches. Adult-as-child is really unnerving and in this production, it adds a Cassandra-esque layer.
5. I admit it: at times I was perving. Holy hell, Cassius (Jenny Jules)’s abs are amazing.

One problem for me was that as the action scaled up after Caesar’s assassination, I wasn’t sure what to do with the prison setting. Part of my brain was still trying to work out what significance the setting still had – for best enjoyment you just need to leave that behind and focus on with the plot, but my brain couldn’t quite do it.

The setting and the tale make an interesting mix, but they don’t fit perfectly throughout. Brick it ain’t.

Also, there was an interesting dissonance between the ‘honour’ described (OK, makes sense) and the ‘love of Rome’ which motivated Brutus and Cassius (but why do you love this place? It’s… prison.)

But if the Torygraph is spitting bullets (twice) over the casting, you know you’re doing something right:

There is a certain poetic justice that Lloyd’s effort should find itself in direct competition with the classy, respectful and hugely entertaining all-male versions of Twelfth Night and Richard III, which are running in rep at the Apollo. These productions would undoubtedly have met with Shakespeare’s approval.

– Tim Walker, Telegraph 14/12/12

BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENS?

Dude, if you feel that threatened by affirmative action: there is everywhere else that you could go.

All in all this production is tough, gutsy and giving its all to sort out the massive under-representation of women in theatre.

And the modern, unpretentious setting gives you a huge amount to think about – above and beyond the plot of an already dense play. It’s on until the 9th of February.

Have you ever seen those videos of Harry Potter fans in Japan? Go and YouTube some now. Okay. I’m like that, but with Jacobean revenge tragedies. I will camp out on the internet and snipe front row tickets and then work seventy hours of overtime to afford them. I will sob behind my fingers and moan, “Their love is so real” to myself as characters stab each other up on stage. I will embarrass the actors and everyone around me by simultaneously crying and cheering during the applause at the end. I’m getting a tattoo of one of the stage directions from John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, for crying out loud. A tattoo. This is a Thing for me. I’d reblog gifs all over Tumblr for The Changeling and Edward II if such gifs existed.

But they don’t, because it’s just me.

I get away with writing flailing fanboyish nonsense for my film reviews, but I don’t know how far I’ll get away with it for this. Let’s see.

What it is, is that I went to see Cheek By Jowl’s new production of the aforementioned ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore at the Cambridge Arts Theatre last week. It’s a modern dress production, featuring a single, static set, a nearly omnipresent ensemble cast, and modern dance. Oh, and lots and lots of sex and violence. It’s directed by Declan Donnellan, who took a modern dress production around London in the ’80s, and this is his new version that’s doing a big tour around France and the Sydney Festival, before coming to roost in London’s Barbican Centre in the near future.

Before I trundle on in my usual obtuse fashion, let me outline the plot of ‘Tis Pity for you, in case you don’t know it. Once upon a time in Parma, Giovanni falls in love with his sister Annabella. It’s requited and consensual and they carry on in secret for some time. Annabella is, unfortunately, being courted by sixty zillion guys other than her brother, and her father’s all, “please marry someone because your brother’s a bit useless, ps. don’t marry your brother lol”. It’s all okay and she can put off marriage virtually indefinitely, which is relevant to her interests because she’s in a very nice relationship with Giovanni, ta very much AND THEN SHE BECOMES THE PREGNANT and GUESS WHAT it’s obviously her brother’s. So, in order to divert the dreadful shame of being pregnant out of wedlock, she marries Suitor #1, Soranzo, who is not a very nice man (with previous abusive history) and who has an even worse manservant called Vasques, who likes to shiv people. Soranzo finds out Annabella’s pregnant, Vasques does some Sherlocking and finds out it’s Giovanni’s, and Giovanni, with time-honoured 24-carat flawless logic, decides to avert the on-coming crisis by killing Annabella, ripping out her heart, and taking the heart to a party. Then, everyone dies.

It’s the best play.

I was amazed at the audience, first. It was all – ALL – middle class couples about twice my age! They didn’t look as though they were there for the same reasons I was, to put it tactfully. I felt decidedly shifty in my spiked collar and skinny jeans, with my boyfriend and my ‘hawk haircut. Aside from the central relationship, I was looking forward to seeing how homoerotic this production had made Vasques’s relationship with his master, Soranzo. And, yes, I wanted to see squirting blood and eye-gouging. That’s what I was there for, and I clutched my Feelings Scarf (the stripy scarf I take to every film or play I see so that I can cuddle it and cry into it; I am ridiculous) and was essentially self conscious right up until Annabella (Lydia Wilson) came on stage.

As soon as she emerged, I lost my comparing-myself-to-the-audience anxiety completely. With ‘Tis Pity, I’m used to Annabella being painted as this passive recipient of Giovanni’s (Jack Gordon) affections. She is tossed about between her suitors and her brother, and it’s never really clear what she wants because you only ever see her through the lens of the men and their desires – so she’s this unattainable, Madonna/whore figure that I’d never really felt I could connect with.

Not this Annabella! Nope. She’s a tiny, scrappy waif with a half-shaved head and tangled hair, adjusting her laptop with her feet so that she can watch a film with her headphones on. Her bedroom – the set where the whole thing takes place – is adorned with posters for True Blood and Dial M For Murder, absinthe and The Vampire Diaries. She has tattoos and scruffy sneakers. Just visually, I found her easy to bond with: like someone I could have met in the pub. “Shame, though,” I thought, watching her bounce about on her bed, waiting for the lights to drop and the play to properly start, “that the play is mostly from Giovanni’s perspective.”

While that’s textually true, it certainly wasn’t the case for this production, which literally revolves around Annabella. She’s practically on stage all the time, even when she’s not participating in a scene. She’s picked up and hoisted about. She leads the dance numbers. She gets dressed up as a Madonna, complete with lit-up fairylight halo. She has all these extra actions and reactions, and when she speaks, she speaks… clearly. She fights back when Soranzo (Jack Hawkins) hits her. Her decisions about herself and her love life are clearly made, physically and verbally, and she makes her mind explicit. I was, frankly, amazed, having never really seen Annabella performed with this kind of clarity and sympathy before. I’m normally a Giovanni kind of guy – I always read him as this obsessive, devoted, atheist whose life is ruined by his social context and coercively-assigned religion, but Donnellan’s staging gives Annabella such agency that watching it, I found my allegience changed.

Soranzo, Annabella’s abusive suitor, whom she marries in haste to cover her pregnancy, was also painted rather more sympathetically than usual, which I found problematic. Yes, I know it’s boring and tedious to have Soranzo just be this using, bastardous wanker with no other dimensions at all, but, for the love of god, he hits her! He hits her and draws blood! He beats her and fetches a coathanger as if to forcibly abort her pregnancy! Come on! And then, we get this bizarre little insertion of tenderness where he buys her baby clothes and they look at them together and he’s sweet and tender, and you can see she’s changing her mind about him, and that’s not in the text, that’s been deliberately added – but why? Tell me I’m not the only one to find that intensely fucking awkward. I mentioned the coathanger, right?

As you can imagine, this production isn’t going to be easy viewing for everyone. It never is. It’s ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore. It’s a sympathetic play about incest that features heavy violence. This, however, is a marvellously hard-hitting, sensuous, lush performance all lit in red and green, which makes the action simultaneously really gory and really… I don’t know, tactile? (Men get their shirts off a lot and touch each other. I was a bit overwhelmed. You gotta understand.)

Oh, wait, wait, one other thing: Vasques (Laurence Spellman). In the text, Vasques is pretty much uniformly a Super Bastard. He double-crosses everyone, faithful only to his master – also a bastard – and doesn’t hesitate to seduce and murder his way around the cast, eventually to gloat over how he, as a Spaniard, has outdone the Italians in revenge. And in this production, he’s amazingly likeable! I mean, he’s still a double-crossing, seducing bastard, but he has vulnerability and passion. He folds Soranzo up in his arms and cuddles him. (Oh, and he also has a male stripper bite out the comic relief character’s tongue on stage. He caresses and kisses said stripper while he does it.)

Ford should have called this play Sex and Violence and Incest Party in Parma, Wooooo, and I think Donnellan’s production certainly does the text justice. There’s a lot of bodily fluids either visible or implied (at one point Vasques visibly orgasms whilst licking someone’s shoes, for example) and the whole thing is amazingly visceral to an extent where audience members were cringing and gasping around me. Religion seeps through the action to a huge extent, as is only proper – there’s veils and rosaries aplenty, and a bleeding-heart Jesus on the wall. You end up feeling that, were it not for a societal damnation of incest and premarital sex, Giovanni and boisterous, playful Annabella would be happy together; their separation through the external (ecclesiastical) pressures on her to marry is heartbreakingly, agonisingly painful.

Oh, and there’s a dancing cardinal.

If you have the means and time to go and see this production, I cannot recommend it highly enough. You won’t see anything else like it, and ‘Tis Pity is performed so rarely (probably due to the content!) that when a company does do it, it’s because they really relish it, and it shows. It really shows.

SUFFICE TO SAY, my Feelings Scarf got a good wringing.

• ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore hits London’s Barbican Centre from 16 Feb-22 March 2012. For the full tour, click here.

Guest blogger Lydia grabbed them for a chat about representations of women in horror, resurrecting Grand Guignol for a modern audience, and sawing women in half. Well. Sort of…

Let’s start off by facing up to the accusation that women in horror are condemned to inhabit a narrow range of stock characters. Is this the case in the Grand Guignol? What are these characters? Where did they tropes originate? What purposes do they serve?

Stew: It can seem sometimes that the women in horror only embody the Madonna/Whore complex, and that men have their own Cunt/Hero division. It’s actually not as straightforward as that. When those tropes crop it’s usually for reasons concerning the practicalities of how horror works – there is a need for heroes and villains.

EJ Martin in Laboratory of Hallucinations

Tom: Horror doesn’t often have a lot of time to spend developing sophisticated characterisation, and uses shorthands as a result. The most obvious and irritating stereotype is the angel of the house, or the innocent virgin, the best example being Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The character’s common in older Grand Guignol, though as the plays grew more sophisticated they’re increasingly rare. It’s simply because, for fairly obvious reasons, if you want people to be upset about a character being destroyed then you want that character to be someone they feel positively towards. In the early 20th century, the easiest way to do that was to bring in a nice, sweet posh girl who was rather inept, so you get a lot of them.

Stew: Another common one is the Hag, which crops up not just in the Grand Guignol but throughout horror. As we found out fairly recently, she’s the proto form of the psycho-biddy, which is a major horror cinema trope, starting with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The hag figures in Grand Guignol, as in a lot of literature before that from Spenser onwards, are generally suggested to be women who have rejected their femininity – women who have become masculinised in some way or are specifically anti-maternal: they eat children, they destroy children. That’s a figure that goes back right through literature and myth. The Grand Guignol used that history together with figures from contemporary Paris: brothel madams and drunks and women who for other reasons were seen as no longer trading in the economies of sex.

Tom: The evil women in Grand Guignol can be really fun – and they’re often interesting characters. Let’s face it, there are no great characters in the Grand Guignol, or in horror generally- it’s not going to contain Hamlet. So a slightly stereotyped but also powerful and charismatic figure is often about as exciting and interesting a part as any man or woman is going to get in this kind of material.

So the gothic trope – of the woman who looks too hard and too deep and finds terrible things, seemingly punished for curiosity and empowerment – that doesn’t crop up in the Grand Guignol?

Tom: That’s a gothic trope, but was never in the original Grand Guignol, which doesn’t deal with those gothic elements of haunted houses and graveyards.

Stew: The Grand Guignol grew from Théâtre Libre which was naturalist theatre, and which existed to reflect the scandal sand stories of Contemporary Paris and Europe more widely.

Tom: Particularly working class Paris.

Stew: If you view it as an analogue of Zola or Huysmans, you’re not far wrong. Zola was one of the first who talked about prostitutes and drunks and told their stories without making them into moral points. And the Grand Guignol is essentially an amoral universe.

Tom: There are certainly characters you’re expected to sympathise with or like, but it doesn’t ever punish. It doesn’t punish for being good, it doesn’t punish for being bad, it just basically rains destruction down upon pretty much everything.

Stew: The gothic universe is a moral one, and very distant from natural. In many ways the kind of work Théâtre Libre was doing was a stand against that gothic high melodrama which you might see on the Parisian stage. So a lot of those female tropes, a lot of what you’d find in an Ann Radcliffe novel or even in Edgar Allen Poe’s more explicitly European gothic fiction don’t actually find their way into the Grand Guignol.

Tom: To me, most of the interesting bits of the grand Guignol – and what we do – is not really, as it might sometimes seem, the destruction of women by men, but the destruction of humanity by inhumanity. Rather than having a big monster that looms and attacks (although that sometimes happens) it’s more interesting to look at a human become a monster, and then to see that human monster inflict damage on themselves and others. For writers in the early 20th century, it was easiest to use innocence or maternity as a symbol for the most human aspect of a woman.

Stew: And in men, you’re likely to see an oversophisticated doctor causing damage on the individual’s humanity – on a happy person or on a happy relationship. Scientific progress, more than immoral behaviour, is seen as destructive. The amorality and inhumanity of science is more frightening than the superhuman or superstition.

Tom: So you get all these mad scientists who believe that they can defeat death or uncover the secret of consciousness by hacking up your brain and of course they’re male because of the time they were written and set.

So the more sophisticated plays can explore monstrousness without falling back on those gender stereotypes?

Tom: Absolutely. An example is A Kiss Goodnight, which we produced last year. It opens with a man who has been terribly physically disfigured by his wife – she threw acid in his face. He has intervened in court to prevent her being sent to prison on the condition that she visits him this one last time. So we have a man who seems saintly and who has been destroyed by a woman who is beautiful externally but is, if not monstrous, at least capable of monstrosity. We find out, in due course, that he isn’t a nice chap either, and it’s never clear if his inner monstrosity is a consequence of his physical destruction, or whether he always contained it.

Stew: I think the play suggests that they were both always capable of these terrible things.

Tom: It seems that they were always very well matched, and the play involves getting their physical appearances to match their inner monstrousness as they destroy each other.

So the gore and grossness is not necessarily to do with sin, or having moral damage physicalized?

Tom: The Grand Guignol doesn’t make that kind of judgement. A lot of horror does.

Stew: In the Grand Guignol the amorality and inhumanity of scientific progress is more frightening than immorality or superstition or even the superhuman.

Tom: It explores forces which are seen to destroy or damage humanity: disease and mental illness, religion – that is, religion itself, not God.

Stew: It is important to point out that whilst the Grand Guignol itself is amoral, it was undeniably part of a continuing trend of increasing violence against women in theatre and onstage. In magic for instance, Jim Steinmeyer writes brilliantly about the sawing-a-woman-in-half routine. It’s so hoary now we see it as similar to pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but in fact the action is a horribly violent and brutally misogynistic piece of show which is entirely about killing a woman – putting her back together is optional. At the time, as soon as the trick was invented it was everywhere, everyone had their box illusion and it was always sawing a woman in half, with names like “destroying a woman”, “disintegrating a woman”.

And although there’s little skill involved in the trick, you never see an assistant sawing the magician. So is there an aspect again of who has power over whose body?

Stew: It started happening in the Twenties and Thirties, and I think there was a political aspect to it – these performances formed a backlash against women’s increasing prominence.

Tom: In that specific case I always thought it was simple practical reasons: sawing someone in half is awesome, and magicians want a beautiful assistant for sales reasons. Ergo: woman in halves.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2, in which we talk blood, boobs, cinema’s influence on Grand Guignol portrayals of women, slashers, Final Girls, and more…

• Theatre of the Damned official website
• London Horror Festival official website
• @theatreofdamned

All images used with permission, copyright Theatre of the Damned

The first play of Kaliana’s I saw was Hooray for Hollywood a while back. It told the story of her own horrific childhood in the child sex industry. The play showed adult actors from the waist down (just jean legs, skirts and overheard dialogue) and focused on the level – both emotionally and physically – of the children, who were portrayed with puppets.

I first saw Hooray for Hollywood in July 2010 and wrote about it then for feminist mag Fat Quarter. More recently an abridged version of the play has been filmed for wider distribution and showed at an event on ending child pornography held at Amnesty International Headquarters. The work is powerful, brave, and through ingenious staging conveys what it would be near-impossible to bring out for open discussion any other way. Frequently Hooray for Hollywood is played with a talk afterwards, hosted by various child protection charities.

Puppet (R)Evolution’s current play, Fragile/Sacred, was on as part of the Suspense puppetry festival.

Whereas Hooray for Hollywood was already an extremely creatively-presented play, Fragile/Sacred pushes the boundary further and forms more of an art piece. Once again part of Kaliana’s autobiography, and drawing this time from her teens, the entire performance is wordless, and uses four live actors along with a minimal number of puppets.

The set is a large, square tunnel – with each side draped in a different material, used to great effect to convey everything from undergrowth to water to a hospital ward. The opening sequence of the abusive father figure holding a light-up model of a home and pushing his hand into it and licking his hand – clearly getting a sexual kick out of it – set up the creepiness of the story’s homelife, and was one of the most uncomfortable few minutes of stagetime I have ever seen.

I feel I very much benefited from seeing Hooray for Hollywood first, and feel the two plays could, perhaps, complement each other on a double-bill. As it was, I’m not sure if those coming to Fragile/Sacred afresh would have understood all of it.

However, that said, the play is as much about atmosphere as it is about plot. The father figure character (opening scene aside) is oddly inexpressive – tightly-wound and capable of violence, but the actor playing him nonetheless gives little away facially. I say ‘the actor’ as the part is also sometimes played by a puppet for the longer-range scenes.

Compared to Hooray for Hollywood, Fragile/Sacred is very light on puppetry. It has a father puppet, a rabbit and a raven, as well as some shadow-puppets, but the play also makes good use of models and toys to convey the larger scenes. Puppetry in this play is just one element in a large range of innovative techniques used to convey the story.

Watching adult actors move toy cars or toy helicopters around added a layer of non-optional make-believe to the production. I occasionally found the lines between characters playing and representation of wider plot a little difficult to discern, but that in a way added to the dreamlike quality of the piece.

I found the complete lack of dialogue a little difficult, but – as in the earlier play – this is about a protagonist who sees a lot, but is often scared to speak or act. The character seemed on the surface to be very passive, yet was making brave and bold moves throughout the play. The dreamlike quality of the production conveyed a kind of inner sanctuary that the protagonist retreated to and drew strength from.

A fascinating, artful and thoughtful production – and an absolute must for lovers of physical theatre, as well as anyone working in fields which touch on the themes of abuse. But, strange as it feels to say, I found Fragile/Sacred – the gentler of the two plays I’ve seen – was slightly more difficult for me than Hooray for Hollywood with its more straightforward plot. While Hooray for Hollywood was entirely viewed from the protagonist’s (physical) point of view, Fragile/Sacred seems to be viewed from mostly inside the protagonist’s mind, where there is an often luscious stillness while horrors swirl around her and worlds blend together. That said, the two pieces do inform each other hugely, and I repeat my call for a double-bill.

• ravenkaliana.com
• Puppet (R)Evolution

Photos by Emma Leishman and Tinka Slavicek

]]> /2011/11/16/personal-revolutions-raven-kalianas-fragilesacred/feed/ 0 8482 /2011/11/14/tomboy-time-an-interview-with-marstarrab/ /2011/11/14/tomboy-time-an-interview-with-marstarrab/#respond Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:00:05 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=8447 This week I went along to see Tomboy Blues: The Theory of Disappointment at South London’s Oval House Theatre as part of their “Lady-led” season. The play is a two-hander written and performed by nat tarrab and Rachel Mars. Together, they form the cunningly named mars.tarrab.

I got an insight into their work, and into their minds, before I’d even gotten into the auditorium. Alongside the programme (with its photo of a barbie doll shoved into a pair of boxer shorts worn by an androgynous figure) was something that looked like one of those ghastly tick-box questionnaires. Except it wasn’t. Instead, it presented a whimsical but pertinent checklist about the performers (tall/small), the show and how you could get involved to help them (cake baking or pant sewing) with future projects.



Scientists. For Science!

The play is an hour long and it’s about tomboys. Hurrah! It’s also about the challenges of growing up feeling confined by limited gender options, and the accompanying problems of underwear, of going into the “right” toilet, of working out who you are, who you want to be, and how to fall in love and be yourself. The pair use pseudo-science, white labcoats and some strange experiments alongside clownful vignettes, sad stories and bizarre situations that describe accurately, and often painfully so, the experience of  “disappointment” – how our hopes and expectations of life can fall short when we’re confronted with the brick wall of “what is expected”.

I especially loved the physicality of the two performers, their deft ownership of the space, as well as the glimmer of the personal at the edges of their characterisation. It’s funny and very, very heartfelt – I found myself watching bits of my own childhood and teenage experience onstage. The awkward, clumsy, strangeness of having a cis female body but not feeling especially feminine, and not feeling sure that was allowed, or sure of how to be “in-between”.

Everyone else had come out as these beautiful butterflies and I’d come out as a kind of butterpillar

– Tomboy Blues

The show ended with a discussion with Gendered Intelligence, who work to help improve awareness of gender issues in the public sphere, especially amongst young people. We talked about the word “queer” and what it meant, about how tomboyism might sit under the queer umbrella, and about anxieties of perhaps not feeling “queer enough” sometimes as a person happy within their body yet unhappy with the social requirements of being feminine.



Photo: Kevin Clifford

I also managed to catch up with nat and Rachel via email, to prod them a little further about their work and their ideas.

 Tell us a bit about yourselves and your work so far.
“We met four years ago at a live art performance workshop, and were immediately intrigued about each other’s work, histories and bodies. We made our first show, 27 Ways I Will Never Fuck My Mother by mashing together our two solo shows, then made a spoken word piece called Trauma Top Trumps. Tomboy Blues is our third show.”

Why did you decide to do a piece on tomboys? 
“Our work comes, foremostly, from ourselves and our experience. When we were getting to know each other we found places of similarity and difference, and the common tomboy childhood (and adulthood) was ticklish to us to explore. nat’s friends were having kids, she was looking again at childhood and was alarmed at how often it still is ‘pink for a girl and blue for a boy’ even in these supposedly broken open gender dialogue times. It was also the time of Caster Semenya and her disqualification.”

What kind of research did you do – did you find anything that surprised you?
“We talked to paediatricians, psychologists, tomboys (big ones and small ones), family, friends, mothers and fathers, and ourselves, and we looked at current consumer trends (and their attackers, like Pink Stinks). We were surprised that 50% of women identified at tomboys in childhood, and also at the amount of confusing and conflicting information about tomboys and queerness.”

There’s a bit in the show that talks about the “missing tomboys” – women who identified as tomboys when younger and now do not – why do you think that is?
“We think its a combination of wanting to conform, interest in boys/feeling like you should have an interest in boys, family pressure, high heels, bars and thongs for 7-9 year olds, and negative perceptions of any kind of femininity that isn’t ‘classic’. Plus, there isn’t really an accepted identity that is ‘Adult Tomboy’ – most often it is just ‘lesbian’, which doesn’t take into account straightness, or other kinds of gender queerness at all.”

The full title of the show is “Tomboy Blues or the Theory of Disappointment”. Do you think that being a tomboy has the potential to be a positive as well as a disappointing experience?
“Absofuckinglutely. The title is intended to be playful and provoke thought rather than suggest conclusion. The whole exploration of the piece is about that positivity in all its challenges both from within and without.”

• Tomboy Blues runs at Oval House until 19th November – click here to book.
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