Review: Others, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

The Paper Birds are shedding their skin. In the past, their work has been characterised by delicacy: gentle choreography bathed in tinkling pianos overlaid with tender texts. The materials used – beds, ice-creams, coin-filled tins – had a certain comfortable familiarity. Applying this formula to an unflinching subject, as they did so well with sex-trafficking for the Fringe First-winning In A Thousand Pieces, results in sure-fire teary-eyed worthiness.

Others almost goes so far as to seek absolution for that. The initial intention, it seems, was to represent disenfranchised women onstage; to become a mouthpiece for other women worse off than those in the company. To that end, in the hope of gathering material, The Paper Birds began correspondence with a female prisoner, an Iranian woman and Heather Mills, only to have an epiphany. “What”, they ask instead, “gives us the right to speak for them? In fact, how can we speak for them without speaking from our perspective?”

Accordingly, Others is characterised by its own disintegration as its honourable intentions hit brick walls and shatter. At one point, as the onstage technician-cum-musician repeatedly strikes up the familiar piano overture, he gets berated: It’s too much. It’s not right. It’s manipulative and it’s sentimental and it’s patronising.

As an interrogation of their own practice, then, Others is honest and necessary. Certainly, you have to admire the company’s bravery in admitting to naivety and failure. The trouble is that, in doing that, it cuts its audience out of the equation. What do we gain from watching a piece that speaks only of its own insurmountable obstacles? To overcome that, Others needs to ask why we’ve turned up and what we hoped to gain from watching theatre about those worse off than us. It needs to confront us with our own bourgeois inaction.

Even on its own terms, however, the original project-spec lingers, muddying the central argument, and too much of the physical realisation remains token, merely dressage intended to beautify.

The three performers finally tear up the stage, purging it of soft furnishings, the company leave three lampshades warmly glowing on one side and a bare bulb shining on another. Here, they are caught halfway between the two. It bodes well for the future, but doesn’t satisfy in the present. Essentially, Others is a chrysalis in reverse, transfiguring the company from an over-aesthetic state into something starker, more robust and rigorous. The chrysalis should serve to make the process of change private. From the outside, sadly, it’s just not that interesting to watch.