REVIEW: A MOUTHFUL OF FINGERS at Bridge House Theatre Penge 8 - 12 Nov 2022

‘… treading in the footsteps of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy, is a big ask. This production didn’t quite manage it, but it wasn’t for lack of trying’  ★★

Andrew Mapperley has created a weird and troubling dystopian household, a strange family living on the edge of catastrophe, in the decaying husk of a formerly important household. A stranger emerges from the polluted out-there wilderness, and destroys the fragile balance that the squabbling Warbler clan have constructed.

The players are all very young and fresh-faced, and constrained to play decaying, aged characters. The appearances are problematic, but the cast give it their best, and no-one could deny their commitment. It is an ambitious project, an exercise in world-building and highly wrought prose, to give a poetic insight into a collapsing world. Samuel Beckett was writing this story seventy-odd years ago, and Andrew Mapperley has some catching-up to do, but he makes a fair fist of it.

The set, a number of tea-trollies with a load of plates and cups and a single tea-cake, is a bit messy and fiddly to move, which doesn’t make the post-apocalyptic ambience any more vivid, and some of the players are less confident than others. Caitlin Lee Smith, as the fateful stranger, owns the stage with a swagger. She brought an energy and a sense of purpose to proceedings that was fun to watch. 

Saying something new about the end of the world, treading in the footsteps of Beckett and Cormac McCarthy, is a big ask. This production didn’t quite manage it, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

A MOUTHFUL OF FINGERS at Bridge House Theatre Penge 8 - 12 Nov 2022

@insecta_theatre

THE TEAM

Andrew Mapperley - Writer/ Performer Joseph Wood — Sound design/ Performer

Kat Stidston Performer

Giulia Hallworth Performer

Rens Tesink — Performer

Caitlin Lee Smith Performer

Elisabetha Gruener — Director

Holly Mather — Light technician

Lewis Mote Sound technician

Reviewer:

Chris Lilly read Drama at Hull University in the 70s, stage-managed a bit, spent 8 years as a community arts worker in Tower Hamlets, did the occasional tech job, then taught in East London and participated in shedloads of community theatre. Since retiring from teaching, he has acquired an MA in Theatre from the University of Surrey and indulged a passion for live performance anywhere in London courtesy of his Freedom Pass.