REVIEW: Goodbye ’89 at Vault Festival 18th-19th March
‘The play successfully crystallises the fundamental difficulty in overthrowing the status quo’
Goodbye ’89 in the inaugural production by young theatre company By the Balls, an alliance of six graduates of East 15 Acting School. The piece is clearly driven by an urge to create work that puts underrepresented voices centre stage.
We join six young women on New Year’s Eve, 1989, as they prepare to deliver their manifesto via a spectacular occupation at the BBC radio studios. However, their plan is compromised when a member of the group begins to have second thoughts. In this, the play successfully crystallises the fundamental difficulty in overthrowing the status quo: those of us with the power to affect real change often find it all too easy to turn our backs on our communities, fragmenting the movement with disastrous consequences.
The play takes on a lot; each of the six characters has their own harrowing story, which are shared one-by-one, Breakfast Club style, in a series of monologues that diverges from the otherwise naturalistic dialogue. There is the sense that perhaps there is too much material here to be dealt with satisfactorily within this timespan. Elsewhere, the use of music absolutely helps to situate us in a particular place and time, however, the constant background noise is distracting, in particular the use of Carole King’s ‘Locomotion’ at a key moment sabotages the emotional payoff.
The heart of this piece is its community. The idea of a chosen family is so central to the history of gay civil rights in the US and the UK that it has spawned its own vocabulary, which we now see appropriated by mainstream culture. The success of the performances in this piece relies on the believability of this as a nurturing, loving and supporting unit. Ultimately, the script is too unfocused for us to truly latch onto these relationships, and as a result the emotional core of this history lesson is significantly diluted.
Goodbye ’89, devised and created by: By the Balls Theatre (Martha Caidan, Alice Berry, Michaella Moore, Ophelia J. Wisdom, Ellen Trevaskiss and Rebecca Fox), Vault Festival, 18-19th March, Goodbye ’89 | VAULT Festival
Twitter for the company @BytheBalls_TC
Reviewed by Natalie Mackinnon
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