It’s as if Verity Standen has looked hard at the taxonomy of what performers of every stripe use to entertain and decided, seemingly perversely, to use what is left over, what has been cast aside or thrown away, discarded as of little use. Like the Dadaists for whom the sound was more important than the word she eschews the latter, finding emotional content in the atavistic sounds of an inchoate language of ‘umms’ and ‘aahs’. ‘What can we do with a human voice that hasn’t been done before?’, she asks. The show, in truth a kind of cabaret turn, sets out to explore the possibilities. Instead of dance there is a kind of impatient jumping up and down or a bent-over shuffle as in their entrance, which seemed like the progress of a multi-coloured insect. In one piece, a barber-shop rendition of, ‘You Made Me Love You’, even arms disappear into the costumes. Again, like the Dadaists art is made from whatever comes to hand in terms of the body as instrument. Like a master chef who whips up a Michelin starred meal from leftover scraps, delicious new possibilities emerge from the ingredients.
Unlike the Dadaists there is no cacophony. The voices are sweet – Ellie Showering tending to the angelic. The harmonies at times seem to drift in and out of plainsong. Where words are used, everyday terms are made poetic; injunctions to BOGOF and ‘Enter your pin’, for example, are sung with a detached seriousness that makes them humorous. A simple roundelay is made out of a Tannoy apology for the delay of a train service. The familiar is made special, the ordinary poetic. Other pieces such as, ‘Oh these fears don’t fade with the night’, or ‘You light up my life’, speak more directly to the human condition.
For the most part the three performers (Jannah Warlow is the new girl) are steadfastly unexpressive, Standen intensely so. This means that when there is a reaction it sings by contrast as when a staring surprise meets the silence of a disappearing, ‘aah’.
Like a newly anointed politician smartened up for public consumption the show has had a makeover since its first iteration at the Wardrobe Theatre, prior to an outing at Edinburgh. Some glitzy shoes and smart designer bag-dresses have allowed the show entrance into polite society. The concept does the rest: what starts as a kind of musical/theatrical joke soon becomes hypnotic. Like any worthy art it creates its own world the exploration of which gives us new insight into our own. ★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 4th February 2016
