Before I Was A Bear ☆☆☆
By Eleanor Tindall
The Bunker Theatre, London

Nestled unobtrusively next to Menier Chocolate Factory, its more showy neighbour, is the Bunker Theatre. This former underground carpark is a welcome addition to London’s Off West End with a committed team and an eye for fresh new writing.

Eleanor Tindall’s debut is a one-woman (one-bear?) show that retells the tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses about Callisto, whom Juno turns into a bear when she hears that Callisto is pregnant after being raped by Zeus (Juno’s husband). In Tindall’s capable hands, Callisto becomes Cally, played with enormous charm and verve by JACOBA WILLIAMS.

Dressed in a bear suit, WILLIAMS bounds onto the stage dancing for full comic effect, before removing the bear’s head and starting to tell us about her life before she was a bear. It’s a neat trick because we are left wondering what happened to make her change into a bear.

The writing is engaging and funny and ANEESHA SRINIVASAN’s direction is full of action and movement, but I felt the monologue was much longer than it needed to be. But WILLIAMS keeps her energy throughout and makes sure your attention never wavers.

https://www.bunkertheatre.com/
Until November 22nd 2019

Review by Jonathan Kemp

Queerguru London Correspondent Jonathan Kemp writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches creative writing at Middlesex University. He is the author of two novels – London Triptych (2010), which won the 2011 Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, and Ghosting (2015) – and the short-story collection Twentysix. (2011, all published by Myriad Editions). Non-fiction works include The Penetrated Male (2012) and Homotopia?: Gay Identity, Sameness and the Politics of Desire (2015, both Punctum Books).