After Sunday at Bush Theatre

My theatre going changes over time due to factors like where I am working, artistic directors changing and, obviously, Covid but whatever the reason Bush Theatre in Hammersmith had drifted slightly off my radar and I only sent to see After Sunday because an email from the theatre said that it had a good review from Morning Star!

The synopsis on the website included "Ty, Leroy and Daniel have signed up to a new Caribbean cooking group. But when you’re locked in a secure hospital, too much food for thought can be a bad thing.". This sounded exactly my sort of thing so I am surprised that I had not picked up on it earlier.

Still, no serious damage was done and I got seat A6 fort £20, very much in the no need to think about it price range.

It was good to be back amongst the buzz at Bush and back to a seat in the front row.

While the basic premise of the play was simple, four inmates in a secure hospital attend weekly cookery classes with an Occupational Therapist, the insight to group therapy sessions was unpredictable and engaging.

With the five characters having different pasts and expectations their stories went in different directions and, as with therapy, some of them had significant moments but none of them ended.

Over an hour and a half we had interesting stories rich in all sort of emotions. Stories and characters that I cared about.

After Sunday sounded exactly my sort of thing, and so it proved. I loved it.

August In England at Bush Theatre

The poster tells you that August In England is Lenny Henry's first play and that alone was enough to get a ticket.

I had seen quite a lot of Lenny Henry over his long career starting with New Faces in 1975, Tiswas from 78 to 81 and all the way through to The Witcher: Blood Origin in 2022. I was not going to miss the opportunity to see him in a small theatre playing a part that he wrote.

I booked it back in October, when it was first announced, and having been caught out slightly by a person with large hair on my previous visit I went for the front row, seat AA9, which cost a mere £22.5 due to my pensioner's discount.

Sadly Bush Theatre had stopped doing food and I did not have an established pre-theatre eating place so I looked for one on the walk up from Gunnesbury Station. I finally ended up in the large pub on the corner of Shepherd's Bush and Goldhawk Road which now calls itself Sindercombe Social where a halloumi and chips was well received.

The set was simple and, so it turned out, so was the production. To be honest, it was far more like a monologue than a play. That is merely to clarify its content, and does not diminish it in any way.

Lenny Henry told us the story of a man who, as part of the Windrush generation, came here as a young child. His story was at times ordinary, poignant and funny but always engaging and entertaining. Lenny Henry's fifty years as a performer stood him in excellent stead.

The changing moods of the story, as with any life story it has its up, downs and funny moment, carried us along happily for over an hour.

Then we got to the Windrush Scandal and the story turned dark. For the second time in two nights I was watching a play about the UK's harsh and inhumane immigration policies and for the second time in two days I was saddened, angry and ashamed.

August In England was a very human and very real story told by a master. It was both an entertainment and a political message, and that made it good theatre.

Hir at Bush Theatre was phenomenal

I wanted to see Hir because it sounded quirky in an interesting way, it was at Bush Theatre which is one of my regulars and it had Arthur Darvill, recently of Dr. Who in it. All good reasons and so I paid my £20 for seat A10.

As usual with Bush Theatre I was not quite sure what to expect on the day. I had hoped for a veggie wrap or sandwich but their limited range was devoid of veggie options when I got there so I had to find a cafe instead. Dough & So Bakery did the job very nicely.

I returned to Bush in good time to get a pint of Camden Pale Ale to take in with me.

For Hir the seating was arranged in a more familiar pattern than it had been on my last visit with the stage in the middle and the seating on either side. The slight difference this time was that there was an additional row of seating, row AA, next to the stage and sunk quite low. I was right to have avoided this, despite its proximity, and gone for row A instead.

That stage was a mess. It was an open plan room with the kitchen at one end and a sofa at the other but the main feature was the mess, particularly the clothes strewn about the floor. In the room was a middle aged woman and a similarly aged man, She was happily doing things while he was slumped in a chair. He was also wearing a women's night gown and a rainbow wig. In to this scene arrived their son Isaac (Arthur Darvill) returning from serving in the Marines in a war zone for the last three years.

We met the fourth member of the family, Max, a little later. Max used to be called Maxine.

The title of the play suggests that it was about Max/Maxine but that was just one of the strong themes and the harsh spotlight featured all four family members at various times. A phenomenal amount went on and a lot of it was verging on grotesque, though there were several lighter moments too and I loved the line, "What is the kitchen table doing in the kitchen?".

The impact of the play can be explained by a young woman in the front row almost directly opposite me. She loved the play too (I asked her afterwards) and sat through it with an almost constant look of horror on her face and she brought her hands up to her face several times. We were watching people say and do almost unbelievable things to each other. Making your husband wear a dress was only the start of it.

Hir walked many fine lines brilliantly. It was never voyeuristic in a Jeremy Kyle sort of way or exaggerated in a absurdist sort of way. This was a family on the edge, or several edges, but these were real edges lived on by real people.

And those real people were portrayed magnificently by Ashley McGuire as the mother at heart of the family, Andy Williams as the father deposed from his previous authoritarian role, Griffyn Gilligan as the young man confident in his new role,  and Arthur Darvill as the prodigal son trying to make sense of it all. They all got a lot of applause and cheers at the end and it was all thoroughly deserved.

I like modern edgy theatre and have seen many plays that could be roughly compared to Hir but Hir stood out among them all. It was phenomenal.

Forget me Not at Bush Theatre told a sad story with sympathy and intelligence

The Bush Theatre is on my list of favourite theatres where I check the listings regularly and go to see quite a few of the shows. Competition for time is tough so while I see quite a few shows there I still need some sort of compelling reason to see a show to go. The compelling reason this time was Eleanor Bron.

One of the reasons that I like the Bush Theatre is the cafe which is a welcoming place to wait before the show and to grab a moment with the cast afterwards. This visit worked exceedingly well and I managed to both have something Christmassy (a mince-pie with my coffee on arrival) and a reminder of India (the stew of the day was spinach and paneer). All that remained was to get a beer to take into the theatre. A promising start to the evening.

For once I relaxed and did not fight to be near the front of the queue but still managed to be near enough to the front of the queue to get a seat in the middle of one of the two front-rows.

The seating is arranged slightly differently on each visit that I make and this time it was just on two sides of the stage. As usual the staff were on the look-out for people trying to take photographs of the set and as usual (but not always) I managed to take one anyway. I really have no idea why they do that when most theatres do not bother.

Starting the play with an actor on stage is a common trope and as we entered the main character, Russell Floyd as Gerry.

When the play started Gerry nervously entered a house in Liverpool for an emotional, and difficult, meeting with Eleanor Bron. His Australian accent and her Liverpudlian one suggested why they had not met for a long time.

The story then went back to Australia and we gradually learned about how the meeting came about and why it was necessary. This was the story of children deported to the colonies for their own good over a period of several decades. A lot of the details became public when Gordon Brown made an apology for the scheme in 2010. By telling us just one of the 130,000 stories Forget me Knot made the tale more personal and more dramatic.

The simplest way of interpreting the story was that Gerry was damaged by his harsh and unloved childhood, he had been a slave on a farm, and this had led to his broken life that included busts of rage and heavy use of alcohol. I think that there was more to the story than that and there were hints in the Eleanor Bron character that some of this may have been inherited; the old nature v nurture debate. Russell Floyd and I disagreed over this afterwards.

Whatever the truth of the story it was told with panache, wit and a little magic. The magic was the set changes that were made in the total dark and the last change was made with the lights still on to let us into the secret.

The only two other cast members played their supporting roles well, Sarah Ridgeway as Gerry's daughter Sally who helped to keep him roughly on an even keel and Sargon Yelda as the man who solved the mystery of Gerry's past. I was pleased to be able to grab a few words with Sargon at the station afterwards. It was only later when researching for this blog that I realised that this was the fourth time that I had seen him on stage, twice at the Bush and twice at the Arcola.

Forget me Not and the Bush Theatre did all that I could have asked of them all evening, an intelligent and thoughtful play in a good setting.

Islands at Bush Theatre was compelling, political and weird

Island told me that it was going to be a play about tax exiles and so it was, sort of. It turned out to be more than a play and to be about more than just tax exiles.

But let's start at the end, jump to beginning and then fill in the gaps in the middle.

A couple of days after seeing Islands I came across The Guardian's review of it on one of my RSS feeds and the headline was, "grotesque drama about tax havens avoids the real issues". I did not read the rest because of the conceit of the reviewer in stating that they knew what the "real issues" of the play before. I have read too many reviews of good plays that I have seen where the reviewer has criticised the play for not being what they wanted it to be, rather than for what it was. That is one very good reason not to read reviews.

I had chosen this Monday to go to the Bush on the expectation that I would be working in central London but it proved easier to work from home so I had the easy trip up from Richmond to make. I was still very much counting my steps so I got off the tube at Goldhawk Road and walked the last leg through the empty Shepherd's Bush Market that follows the tube line up to the station that it shares its name with.

I still got there earlier and anticipated and settled down with a leisurely coffee. The queue, of one, had already formed by then but I remained seated until just before the doors opened by which time the queue had grown to about five and so I was still one of the first ones in.

Once again the Bush surprised me with its layout. This time the main part of the performance area was a rectangular pit with seating close by on the two long sides and a little further back on the short sides. I grabbed a seat in the front row on the far side.

For reasons that totally escape me, The Bush has more people looking out for photographers per audience member than any other theatre that I have been to and they take their job seriously so I was unable to get a view-from-my-seat shot but it was not unlike this one that I found on the internet.

The picture also tells you an awful lot about the play and why the adjective "grotesque" was used earlier. The characters and the set made Islands feel like a crash between Rocky Horror and Jerusalem, and that had to be a good place to start.

Islands was more a fusion of ideas and themes to than a story. The elements included strange characters in strange costumes, moving around and through the audience, words and songs, the Garden of Eden and old news recordings. To use just one example, there was a short interval which was announced by the lead character, Mary, by saying that the cast were going to have a short rest, which they did while remaining on the stage.

Tax exile was the theme of the story (though the story was only one of the many themes of the play) which had Mary (played by Caroline Horton who also wrote it) and her two helpers, apparently called Agent and Swill, on an island of land floating just a few feet above the mainland. Mary ruled this land with arrogance and disdain and made slaves of two people, Adam and Eve, captured from the mainland.

The play was about the mood it created, a mood of strangeness, surprises and surrealism. It was a mood that I found engaging and enthralling. Whatever Islands was I liked it, and I liked it a lot.

Albion at Bush Theatre was another fun night at a fun theatre

The Bush Theatre, because of its proximity, atmosphere and my previous good experiences there, is one of the three theatres where the default is that I will go and see every play there and I need a reason not to. The other two are the Orange Tree and the Arcola, with Theatre503 close to joining them.

Albion was a case in point. It looked mildly interesting but I would probably have skipped it if it had been on elsewhere, though the presence of Natalie Casey (Two Pints ...) was obviously a strong pull.

Before showtime was fairly typical for my visits to the Bush; a train back from work in Reading, a quick hop on the tube from Paddington to Shepherd's Bush, something to eat in the cafe/bar area, a coffee to go with it, and then a pint to take in to the theatre.

Also typical was the shambolic queueing system where people mill around the bar, box office and entrance to the toilets and so get in the way of the people trying to use those. Any movement away to somewhere more sensible is discouraged as that leaves gaps for queue-jumpers to fill. And there are queue-jumpers at the Bush. They either need to move the queue to where it can be managed or issue numbered tickets and then admit people in groups, as the Union Theatre does.

Despite the shambolic queueing, I was in to the theatre early enough to get a front-row seat to the left of the stage. At least with seating on three sides there was a lot of front-row to fight over and most of the people before me preferred the centre block, even though you can see more from the sides.

The Bush is one of those theatres that is rather zealous over photography and always has several people in the theatre to enforce the rule, for reasons that escape me, and I was unable to take a decent shot with my proper camera; the best I could do was this discrete shot with my ageing iPhone4.

As can be seen, the stage was set as a bar, though it also became offices, a bedroom and a street at various points. On the right is the raised area where the karaoke was held and off to the right, not pictured, was a sunken area with a pool table. People were playing pool as we went in thus continuing the modern fashion of having actors on stage before the formal start of the performance. The woman won much to the man's surprise, and her's too.

Albion took us into the world of the angry working-class in the East End of London (Tower Hamlets to be precise) where a burgeoning right-wing party was getting some traction with a mixed group of disenfranchised people.

There was a lot more to Albion than just the NF/BNP/EDL story and there were several closely interwoven strands to the plot. One of the group's main people was openly gay and had a secret relationship with a man of Asian origin (not the sort of person welcomed by his group), his sister was in the Army stationed in Afghanistan and a social worker (Natalie) was (probably justifiably) the scapegoat for a child abuse case.

Karaoke played a significant part in all this and, technically, that made it a musical. The singing happened at several key moments in the story and it was usually one character telling us how they felt through the sort of sort that you would expect to hear at a Karaoke evening, songs like I Will Survive and Eye of the Tiger. It could have been cheesy but it wasn't, in fact it worked very well, not least because we knew all the songs.

The stories progressed unpredictably with humour, violence, love and confrontation. It flit between the various stories in a way that I suspect that soap operas do, though it has been many a year since I watched one (is Hilda Ogden still in Corrie?).

The right-wing politics came to the fore from time-to-time but the play was more about the many characters and their interactions, these were often highly emotional, moving from one extreme to another. You could see why some people have Love and Hate tattooed on their fingers, these people's lives were thick with both.

Albion was a highly charged and fast-paced drama that whizzed and fizzed and paused occasionally for a song.

After the show I had a chance word with Natalie (which I had to wait quite a while for!) and I was pleased that she remembered that we had spoken a few years earlier at the Orange Tree when she was also seeing a show there. I also had an unexpected chance word with the leader of the far-right group, Paul (played very well by Steve John Shepherd), who I found later lurking at Hammersmith Station. His was the main character and his portrayal gave the play its backbone.

Albion was good and all the nice things wrapped around it made the evening a lot of fun.

Perseverance Drive at Bush Theatre was rich with ideas

I've fallen in to something of a virtuous circle with the Bush Theatre, the more that I go the more that I like it so I go more.

Perseverance Drive was a case in point. If it had been at another theatre I might well have given it a miss but the Bush Theatre experience was enough to tempt me. That and the fact that it was written by Robin Soams who had impressed me as an actor not long ago at the Arcola in Visitors.

I was working in Reading that day so I ate at the bar there beforehand. I also had a pint of Beck's Vier, which was almost the "Best Bitter" that I had asked for. Luckily I drink both.

The queueing was less frenetic than on recent previous visits and I found myself pretty much at the font of the queue without trying too hard. The two ladies who tried to queue-jump by waiting outside the toilets were less lucky and were sent to the back, not that that was a long way to go. My good organisation got me the seat that I wanted in one of the two front rows. I chose the far one from the entrance just for a change.

Perseverance Drive used the passing on of leadership in a family to address several themes. The mother had just died and the family were gathered for the funeral.

This family had its fair share of skeletons in the cupboard but no more than most families. There was the sibling rivalry between two of the sons one of whom had caused a stir through his relationship with a previously married woman. Another son was gay which was also a problem for the strongly religious family.

Religion was the other main part in the play with two of the sons active in rival evangelical churches and one of the family friends was a bishop.

Rejection was one of the main themes with some family members ostracised because of what they had done and, previously when living in England, the parents of the family had been subject to racial discrimination.

The cast (father, three sons, two wives, a bishop and his son) were all good and the two that I found the most engaging were the competitive wife and the gay son. She was a villain of the piece and he was the hero, in my view.

I tweeted at the time, "Perseverance Drive pokes awkward fingers in to families and religion to create a fine play that questions and entertains", and on reflection I still think that is a decent summary. It could have been a simple family crisis play and still entertained but it was more than that and so it engaged too.

Complex and satisfying Incognito at the Bush Theatre

Bush Theatre has quickly become one of my favourites, helped by the interesting programme, nice cafe/bar area and ease of travel to/from the venue. It's something like the Arcola Theatre in that respect but closer.

All that means that I do not need much excuse to go there which, in turn, means that I do not have to find out much about the shows before I book them. And the upshot of all that is I had little idea of what Incognito was about when I arrived to see it, which is just how I like it. The surprise is part of the fun.

The timings worked well this evening and I arrived at the theatre about ten minutes before the doors opened so I was able to join the queue and order a beer at the same time. The informal queueing system was as messy as always, there just is not a logical place for it, but there were no major incidents (I did hear some grumbling, possibly about me) and we entered the theatre in an orderly manner.

The layout of the stage was different yet again, I have no idea yet what the default configuration of the Bush is. This time the stage was in the middle with racked seating on both sides. That meant that there were two front rows and I was able to claim a middle seat on one of them despite not being anything like the first person in and some of the keen people reserving seats for friends with coats, a common practise at the Orange Tree but not something that I had seen at the Bush before.

The opposite benches may have looked half empty when I took the photo below but that was only because I took it almost as soon as I got in. The show was sold out.

I think that it makes sense to talk about the structure of the play before addressing the drama. I'll try that any way.

A cast of two men and two women played a number of roles across two linked stories. They did not change costumes and they just used the basic acting tools of voice and movement to show who they were.

At first they left the stage area to sit at the edge for a while before returning in a new role but as we got familiar with the characters and the technique these gaps became smaller and then disappeared with them changing role on stage. I had seen this done before, e.g. Middlemarch at the Orange Tree, but not to this extent.

The drama was constructed as three related stories (I think!) that were told in parallel. At least one was not chronological so we had to work out which story we were in, who the characters were and whereabouts in the story each scene was happening, in a set of scenes that changed quickly. That sounds complicated, and it was, but we were led in to it gradually and I was never lost.

Now to the stories. The first concerned the fate of Albert Einstein's brain, the second that of Henry Molaison who developed a sever memory problem following brain surgery. The surgery had been given to try and cure his fits but that was not very obvious in this production.

I only knew because I had seen the story before in 2401 Objects at Jacksons Lane in 2011. This production also used the same cast to tell two parallel tales, then it was Henry's past and his present. Those coincidences troubled me slightly and took the edge off an otherwise excellent production.

The third story concerned a neuro-scientist who having been married and had a son had then started a relationship with another woman. The tension in this story was the secrets she kept from her new lover about her previous straight life.

The stories were there just as an excuse to string a series of related scenes together, something like a fast action sketch show, and the drama came from the flow of the scenes and the way that the actors and the set stayed static in the middle of these changes but adapted, chameleon-like, to each scene.

Incognito was brilliantly constructed and, in that respect, was probably the most complex production that I have seen. This is what excellent theatre-craft can do. It was also very human and warmly emotional with the stories concentrating on the people in them and how they felt about the events happening to them. A few eyes were probably moistened.

The best analogy that I can think of to try and make sense of it all is that it was like eating a box of nice assorted chocolates quickly.

Ciphers at Bush Theatre

Having discovered Bush Theatre only recently it has quickly established itself as one of my favourites thanks to it's programme, cafe/bar area, atmosphere and proximity.

They still need to fix the queueing though. I was in the queue good and early just behind a group drinking wine who were not really in a queue but then decided that they ought to be. No problem there. What did annoy me was the small group that decided to stand near to the door when the queue clearly ran along the bar. By doing so not only did they queue jump but they got in the way of the ticket collection desk and the toilets. They were American.

The theatre surprised me. I was used (after two visits) of it being laid out as a thrust stage with the audience on three sides but this time it was arranged as a normal proscenium stage.

I grabbed a seat in the front row, next to the Americans who had bagged the centre three seats.

The reason for using a proscenium stage soon became apparent as the scene changes were achieved by sliding screens across the stage (hence the grooves) with people and objects appearing and dispersing as they did so.

Ciphers was a good old-fashioned spy thriller in the mode of Spooks. And being a spy thriller I was never quite sure if what I was watching was real, or staged for the benefit of the "other side".

The plot was complicated by a little time switching and by using all of the actors in two roles.

The bits of the story that are, I think, not disputed are that a young woman is recruited in to the espionage services of the UK and Russia and is then killed. Whose side she was really on and why she was killed remained something of a mystery, or at least was open to interpretation, though we did learn who killed her.

The story moved on at a brisk pace with lots of short scenes; an interview, a date, an encounter, an interrogation, a meeting, a murder. These jumped between locations, times and characters so it was always an interesting challenge to keep up.

As with any realistic spy story there may have been an end but there was no ending.

It was fun to see a spy story for a change and this one was pleasingly done. I liked the construction of the play, the use of actors in dual roles and the acting was neat. Ciphers was another feather in the Bush Theatre's impressive cap.

Jumpers for Goalposts at the Bush Theatre

I discovered the Bush Theatre through a theatre company that I am keen on and having discovered it I have now adopted it as one of my "locals". This means that I keep an eye on what is on there and I need an excuse not to go.

There was no excuse not to go to see Jumpers for Goalposts. It sounded quirky (the best adjective for a play, or for anything) and was getting good reviews.

I had spent the afternoon pleasantly in the Liberty Sales (two more shorts acquired) then I took the Central Line out to Shepherd's Bush getting there about an hour before the show. Plenty of time for a bowl of warming and filling soup and then a pint of Chiswick.

With about ten minutes to go I got in to the queue. Which was a mistake. The Bush Theatre has an unusual layout and an unusual way of filling it. Those of us in first where led in to the central section where we could get in to the back four or five rows but not the front two. Only once this central block was filled were people allowed in to the hallowed front rows. So the latecomers got the seat I wanted. I'll have to fix that for next time. And there will be a next time.

As always I had forgotten exactly why I had chosen to see this play and was happy to let that surprise me. The first surprise was revealed when the audience filled out and the young couples I had seen in the bat area were outnumbered by the gay men. So this was a gay play then. I suppose if I had looked at the poster I might have realised that.

The play followed a team, Barely Athletic, in the Hull Pub's LGBT Football League. What a great idea! The LGBT bit was easy but it too a while to get use to the Hull accents.

Having contrived a marvellous setting the play then contrived to pull a lot of humour and charm from it.

There is a love story in there and it is about two men but there is a lot more to it than that. It is a play about five unusually people who become a (not very good) team and it is the natural interactions between them that provide the warmth and laughs.

As they talked after the matches we found out more about them and what made them tick. And the more we learnt the more we liked them.

The humour is just the sort that people share all the time at work and at play and is all the more rewarding for being continuous and low key rather than aiming for some big slapstick  moments. For example, the league table they use to track their progress has one of the team names, "Man City" (good pun), replaced with a simple "Wankers". Another memorable light moment came when they managed to beat fellow struggles "The Trannies" because they had turned up to play drunk and wearing stilettos.

Jumpers for Goalposts was a delightful and uplifting play that would have warmed even the coldest of hearts on the coldest of Winter nights.

Chalk Farm and Brown Bird at the Bush Theatre

This was my first visit to the Bush Theatre but it will probably not be my last, despite the horror journey there by bus on a Saturday evening. Why do so many people try to drive in London?

Next time I'll ignore the journey planner app and go by tube - Bush Theatre is right next to Shepherd's Bush Market station so that is the sensible option anyway.

Bush Theatre, like the Arcola, has a nice cafe/bar area to rest and recuperate before, during and after performances.The main seating area is enhanced by huge bookcases stuffed with scripts, most of which are for sale.

I went to see Chalk Farm because the company behind it, ThickSkin, were behind The Static, one of my highlights from last year.

That proved to be a mixed blessing as I was hoping for more of the same but while Chalk Farm was good it suffered in my mind in the comparison.

The other comparison that hurt Chalk Farm was with Mottled Lines (Orange Tree July 2012) which told the same story more imaginatively and more effectively.

Chalk Farm gave us an insight into the riots of 2011 from the perspectives of a young boy and his single mother who both got caught up in the riots in their own ways. The boy's story was much as expected but his mother's gave a very different perspective of the wider impacts of the riots and these involved her directly, i.e. they were not the result of being the boy's mother.

These two stories were told as narrative with the two actors talking directly to us most of the time and usually when alone on the stage. The stories intertwined with each actor saying their piece then making way for the the other to say theirs. Only a few times were the two actors on stage at the same time and talking to each other.

The acting was good and both characters were convincing. The only minor gripe that I had on this was that we learnt towards the end that the boy was 14 years old when the actor was clearly much older than that. I think that it would have been better if his age had been given as 16.

I was surprised, given the physical nature of The Static, of how little action there was on stage. Bush Theatre has a thrust stage with the audience on three sides but this open space was largely ignored with all the action taking place at the back. Chalk Farm may well have been developed for a normal (proscenium) stage but not using the open space at the front looked very odd, especially as I was sitting at the side, and it was almost as if the actors were afraid to venture out.

All that I have said so far may seem negative but that is only in comparison to my expectations. Chalk Farm was a warm and intelligent play and I liked it a lot.

I only saw Brown Bird because it was part of the double-bill and I had no idea what to expect.

Sadly many of the people there to see Chalk Farm left at the interval and did not have the courtesy to see the other play. That was their loss as Brown Bird was truly remarkable.

It was another narration, this time by an awkward and (sorry) not very attractive young woman who, we learn, is a leader for the Brownies, hence the Brown Bird. She is the only person that we met.

She tells us things about her life, the ungrateful auntie that she cares for, the woman she is in a relationship with, her dog, incidents from the past, what she does with the Brownies. It was all very warm and touching.

Then something happens and a nice story turned nasty. A lie became the truth and a secret that could have corrected it remained a secret. There are some (6!) lights in the darkness but it is a deep darkness and the life of a gentle, kind and selfless woman was torn apart.

The story was special and what made it even better was the way that it varied in pace and mood with, for example, one short sad memory being followed by a longer happy one.

The story needed a good storyteller and Paula Penman was superb.

Brown Bird had been totally involved and I was emotionally drained at the end. I would have hugged Paula for comfort had she not disappeared off stage.