This Bitch Can Heal ☆☆☆
The Vault Festival
Did you have a new year’s resolution to get healthy? If so by the end of January you will have learnt that there is a reason gym classes last just under an hour. It’s about all a human can take of pushing yourself to your limit. Perhaps you decided to be more environmentally conscious? By now are you wishing you could just be forgiven a few air miles if it gets you out of the winter cold?
Jack furiously pedals a bike for just under an hour on stage in This Bitch Can Heal, telling us a vital part of their character. Internally at boiling point yet unable to communicate themselves to the world Jack throws themselves into other people’s truths. Embracing their rebellion, their protests, revolution, and manifestos. Cycling across town, at any hour, to join a protest Jack is able to leave behind the difficult questions of their personal feelings and the nature of their relationships.
Jack is inspired. Starting with the awe they feel at the kid’s school strike for the climate and the example of Greta Thunberg they escape the mundanity of unemployment and console themselves with doing something that has unquestionable value. A fork in the road is hit just as the audience is starting to share their inspiration, Jack talks a little too much about how much Jack is needed by the protesters. The mood shifts. Is Jack ‘themsplaining’ to us? Is this about the need to change the world or Jacks need to be needed?
Skillfully balancing an inspiring story about political motivations with the more difficult nature of personal motivations the stresses between the two are evident in Jack. Is Jack a warrior for climate justice or a messy bundle of emotional immaturity looking for answers? Or, as embodied by Jack who is suffocated by anything except they as a pronoun, is that just another binary choice that is false? Is Jack just both?
The performance by Pink Splat Productions is manic, soulful, overbearing, and demanding in equal measures. It is sweaty, energetic and committed. A person, a bicycle and the whole world weighing down their backpack.
Written and performed by Tamsin Omond
Music directed and performed by Rob DesRoches
Directed by Dani Dinger
Until Jan 30th https://vaultfestival.com/
Review by Andrew HebdenQueerguru Correspondent ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day.
Labels: 2020, Andrew Hebden, London Theatre, review, The Vault Festival
