Press
Jennie Benton Wordsmith at the Edinburgh Fringe
18 August, 2015**** Three Weeks
Hailing from Tunbridge Wells, Jennie Benton is a young spoken word artist with a passion for ‘Countdown’, whose influences range “from Kate Tempest to Flavor Flav”. Susan Harrison’s eager and enthusiastic character is highly endearing, very funny and brilliantly portrays teenage naivety and awkwardness. Supported by her best friend Auburn Joe, she delivers her take on subjects such as love, hate and friendship, plus a gangster rap about how beautiful the world is. The show is full of surprises, as she contends with technical glitches, Joe’s poor time-keeping and a crush on her teacher Mr Bayne. This is Benton’s first foray into the Fringe and, while things don’t quite go to plan, she carries on unperturbed.
Underbelly Med Quad, until 31 Aug.
tw rating 4/5 | [Daisy Malt]
**** Four Stars, edfringereview.com
Susan Harrison’s comic creation, Jennie Benton Smith, is an adorable, bonkers bundle of fun. Jennie Benton Wordsmith is the character’s spoken word show, which is helped along by her gawky best friend Auburn Joe. Together, they strive to bring powerful messages of social change to their audience, standing firm against the monotonous tide of their Year 10 classmates. A stand-up character routine turns into a delightful story of friendship and love, as Harrison’s cleverly constructed show keeps its audience laughing and ‘aww’ing throughout.
Jennie is tiny, feisty and funny, a Tunbridge Wells teen disguised as a ‘peculiarly androgynous’ gangster from the hood. She bounces onto stage with enough energy to power the room’s booming speakers, which in turn provide the backing to a series of hilarious raps and poems which perfectly capture the voice and mind of a slightly off-the-wall 15 year old. If you’ve seen enough comic poetry to last you a lifetime this Fringe, don’t discount this show just yet – whilst providing much entertainment and humour, these pieces are only part of the show’s charm.
The narrative which arises when things go awry, and the daring and inventive use of the audience make Harrison’s achievement unique. Harrison never breaks character, and is ready to work with anything her audience gives her. Auburn Joe is a wonderful co-star, lovable and sweet in his awkwardness.
Occasionally, Harrison’s jokes fell flat, some perhaps pitched too narrowly for a wide-ranging audience, and these prevent the show from producing truly outstanding comedy. But by the end of the show, it seems that the stand-up image is merely a sideline for a highly developed and well-structured play – a play that touches as much as it amuses, and entertains from beginning to end. Never boring, Harrison’s brilliant acting and winsome characters will not fail to put a smile on the face and a perhaps a tear in the eye of her captive audience.
The Guardian
There are certain cliches that crop up time and time again in the work of character comedians: the Vicky Pollard-esque teenager, the indifferent toff, the passive-aggressive married couple. The middle-class rapper is another of these tired staples, but Susan Harrison has found a way to transcend its over-familiarity. Her creation, Jennie Benton Smith, is a 15-year-old – and Harrison is able to inhabit the body and mind of an adolescent so convincingly that it’s almost uncanny. The gawky physicality, the peculiar obsessions, the flitting between precociousness and nervousness: this is first-class comic acting. And the amount of thought that’s gone into this is evident from Harrison’s ability to improvise in character. It’s sometimes said by comics that there are no hackneyed subjects, only hackneyed approaches. Harrison certainly hasn’t come up with one of those.
John Oliver, The Guardian, 25 July 2015
Everyday Maps For Everyday Use, Finborough (December 2012)
7 December, 2012**** Four Stars, Arts Desk
Woking and Mars both provide subject matter for cartographers. John, who reckons he’s an achiever, is updating the local A to Z, while Behrooz, once a colleague of John’s, is exhibiting his paintings of the red planet. There’s a neat overlap in their occupations: the Martian invasion in H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds took place on Horsell Common, Woking.
Tom Morton-Smith, one of the winners of the Papatango New Writing Competition, is not afraid of metaphor. In an age when religion and family structure no longer provide a moral life-map, it may be difficult to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, between momentary – even forbidden – desire and genuine feeling. Morton-Smith sets about examining this uncomfortable area of uncertainty with enormous gusto, finding comedy as well as desperation on the way. He explores too the sometimes insidious role of new technology in shaping relationships, fuelling fantasy and recording events later regretted.
His characters, whose lives interlock, search for a way to happiness but usually find only self-disgust. Maggie, claiming to be 16 but probably younger, seduces Behrooz (Moncef Mansur) on the very spot which she reckons is still warm from Wells’ Martian landing. He does not want to admit to himself that her youth is what attracts him and is, to begin with, unforgiving of John who, when they were friends, looked at child porn sites on his – Behrooz’s – computer “for research”. John (Michael Shelford), now proudly brandishing his wife’s baby-scan, first wants to hide his previous behaviour and then confess it, while also trying it on with Maggie’s sexy mother, Corinne.
Corinne claims to be her daughter’s “best friend” but actually has very little connection with her, carelessly leaving her stash of sex toys to be investigated by a nine-year-old Maggie. A dominatrix when not doing her PR job, Corinne is discovered by her daughter in flagrante with an ageing, handcuffed actor, the very same whom Maggie’s friend Kiph (Kevin to his Mum) has sought out for adulation. He had been the hero of a schlocky sci-fi television series in the 1980s, set – of course – on Mars.
The embarrassing sex scene is deliciously funny with Michael Kirk (pictured left) as the erstwhile “astronaut” gamely stripping to baggy boxers and hoping for what adventurous Corinne (Cosima Shaw) dismisses as “vanilla”. There’s comedy too in nerdy Kiph’s efforts to be cool enough to win the apparently sophisticated – actually lonely and disturbed – Maggie, toiling through Japanese alien porn sites to understand her sexual preferences. Harry Lister Smith, with his scarlet coxcomb quiff and green earring, does an excellent job, while Skye Lourie admirably captures the confusion and anger of a lost teenager rushing into experiences she can’t control.
While his characters flail about without a road map, Morton-Smith ironically relishes pattern and order: the interweaving of strands is sometimes almost too neat. And this is, in the end, a bleak view of modern relationships. It would have been heartening if someone had been allowed to discover, if not romantic love, at least a friendship based on more than naivete, but this is a crisply written piece, bravely raising questions about the grey areas on the edges of pornography and paedophilia. And director Beckie Mills keeps the whole 75 mins bubbling at a great pace.
Heather Neill, The Arts Desk.
UK Theatre Network
Tom Morton-Smith’s intelligent new play, one of the winners of the Papatango New Writing Festival, discusses modern relationships and investigates the place where sexual fantasy and reality meet. Maggie has found a warm patch of ground on Horsell Common – the site of the Martian invasion in H G Wells’ The War of the Worlds. She believes something is buried there – a space ship? – and sneaks out of the house in the dead of night to dance on the warm spot to the sound of David Bowie’s Life on Mars. Here she meets Behrooz, an amateur astronomer and artist who spends his nights mapping the surface of Mars. Maggie dreams of having wild alien sex and Behrooz is at least somewhat different so she tries to seduce him, hoping that an alien will enter his body while they are lying on the hot spot. Cartographer John is remapping the streets of Woking. He’s about to become a father and is terrified by the thought. He is also deprived of sex because he cannot bring himself to sleep with his pregnant wife. The thought of a third person inside her makes him feel uneasy. He finds an ally in Corinne, Maggie’s mother – a woman struggling to keep her exotic sex life separate and secret from her daughter. At first, John declines her offer because he is a married man but he accepts her business card. Kiph is madly in love with Maggie and will even explore adult Manga to understand Maggie’s fantasies. Kiph attends a book signing to meet his hero, Richard Bleakman – star of cult 80s sci-fi show “John Carter of Mars”. Richard has problems of his own. He replies to a post by Corinne to have casual sex with her, the conventional way. But Corinne has other ideas and Richard soon finds himself chained to the ceiling, clad only in his boxers as Maggie enters.
Tom Morton Smith’s characters are looking for happiness but end up in self-disgust. Behrooz caught John downloading paedophilia to his computer, which ended their friendship. Now he is sleeping with a young teenage girl who is probably younger than sweet sixteen. Richard had a bad falling-out with his son calling him a pervert, now there is photographic evidence of his own S&M activities. The lives of the characters are interconnected and they are all trying to cross new boundaries – Maggie by dreaming of sex with a multi-tentacled alien, Kiph as a sci-fi geek, Behrooz by cartographing Mars and creating original art, and Corinne by having exotic sex with strangers. Skilfully directed by Beckie Mills, this intriguing new play is funny and shocking but also sad, performed by an outstanding cast. Michael Kirk is excellent as the former sci-fi star Richard Bleakman, mourning his ruined relationship with his son. Harry Lister Smith is sweet natured and caring as the geeky Kiph who would go all the way to Mars for Maggie. Skye Lourie conveys the loneliness and longing of the troubled teenage girl who cannot be her mother’s best friend. Moncef Mansur convinces as Behrooz who gave up his career as a cartographer to become an artist and succumbs to Maggie’s youth.
Carolin Kopplin, UK Theatre Network.
A Younger Theatre
Everyday Maps for Everyday Use contains moments of brilliance. As part of the Papatango New Writing Festival, inevitably the writing is offered up for scrutiny. Everyday Maps for Everyday Use confuses me with its inconsistency – I couldn’t quite work out what I didn’t like about it. At times, it is brilliant – tightly-constructed, familiar and truthful. However, sometimes playwright Tom Morton-Smith makes his characters say things that are utterly unbelievable. At time, the twists and turns of this interwoven, multi-character plot are ingenious; at others, they are too neat, too useful and at the disposal of the narrative. This combines to make Maps an evening of ebullience with moments of wonder, but ultimately unsatisfying.
The action follows the stories of six characters and their sexual perversions and unhappiness. Morton-Smith crams a lot – perhaps too much – into his 80 odd minutes. The plot centres around Woking in 2012, and is essentially a collection of people trying to find love – sexual, romantic, parental – and the obstacles they meet. Maps also explores Martian travel, the shifting nature of the world and the impossibility of mapping it (hence the title) and how to come to terms with pain, insufficiency and loneliness.
This play would speak to different individuals in different ways – and this is one of its strengths. While it covers a lot (perhaps too much) Morton-Smith’s writing is never didactic or rigid, leaving the audience to pick and choose fundamental messages. For me, the most interesting idea in the play was one that is very rarely explored – the morbid fear and physical difficulty of childbirth. Corinne Radd (Cosima Shaw) describers her pregnancy: “alone with your thoughts and this creature inside of you… a monster in your gut”. Her daughter Maggie (Skye Lourie) fantasises about tentacled, heartless beasts raping her and impregnating her. John carries around an ultrasound of his unborn child, pointing out the head, the little fingers and toes in the blurry image. This motif is one of the most challenging and compelling in the play. How do we reconcile ourselves with these creatures we produce? They grow inside you – almost parasitically (Alien-like is one comparison drawn in Maps), but emerge and grow up to become people with sadness and perversions and loneliness just like you.
Aptly, given the preoccupation with parenthood, stand out performances come from mother and daughter duo Skye Lourie and Cosima Shaw. They are exceptionally well cast as relatives – aside from looking alike, they share sharply observed mannerisms and physical quirks. Both also exude mischief, sex, playfulness and desperation – they are a delight to watch. Lourie’s Maggie opens the show, dancing in her own world to David Bowie. With a few simple movements, she commands the stage. Having never seen her before, she is one to watch for the future.
Everyday Maps for Everyday Use is a knotty, challenging piece. Its inconsistency is frustrating, because it contains moments of exemplary writing – at the level of the sentence, character, plot and in terms of relationships. There are a selection of monologues in the piece that are almost uniformly outstanding: raw, nimble and devastating. They are a great example of the disjuncture of Morton-Smith’s writing: brilliant set pieces, but it’s difficult to believe these characters would speak publicly in this way. Perhaps being braver with form, and allowing these moments to take place alone onstage, would have been interesting.
While this is not a perfect show, when it hits it really hits. It is certainly worth seeing. Director Beckie Mills handles the stage deftly, and lighting designer Neill Brinkworth has created a delightfully subtle palette in a limited space. Overall, frustrating because of its moments of brilliance, but largely worth it.
Jessica Edwards, A Younger Theatre.
Partially Obstructed View
When the Finborough played host to the Papatango playwrighting competition for the first time last year, they went for an ambitious programme of staging, alongside the winner’s month-long run, week-long runs of the other three finalists. This year they’ve reined things in a bit, with a couple of rehearsed readings of finalists, but full productions for the top two plays, running in repertory. First, the runner-up, Tom Morton-Smith’s Everyday Maps for Everyday Use.
The soundtrack as the audience enters is a selection of Bowie’s more space travel-fixated songs, as the play is set in Woking, where HG Wells had the aliens first invade in The War of the Worlds, and Morton-Smith’s characters’ lives, ambitions and sexual inclinations are all in some way or other tied up with Mars; the play follows the various ways the six people’s lives intertwine.
John (Michael Shelford) is a cartographer, working on updating the A-Z, and enjoying the way changing maps reflect the world’s changes. His former university friend Behrooz (Moncef Mansur) has stopped mapping the Earth, and is now an artist painting maps of the unchanging Martian landscape. He’s being exhibited in the gallery run by Corinne (Cosima Shaw,) a single mother with a fondness for tying up men she meets online. Her teenage daughter Maggie (Skye Lourie) is finding that she has a fetish for Japanese Anime about sex with aliens’ tentacles. Maggie’s geeky best friend Kiph (Harry Lister Smith) is in love with her, and so trying to get his head round her kink which creeps him out. He himself prefers the cosier Mars of a creaky 1970s sci-fi show, whose star Richard (Michael Kirk) is in town for a signing. The sextet have a number of sometimes surprising ways in which their lives cross over, and Beckie Mills’ production picks up on all the humour in Morton-Smith’s script, which came across despite the audience being a bit thin on the ground this afternoon.
But the play also has some interesting and insightful things to say about sexuality, and the way in which the internet and fan fiction have opened the floodgates to finding out, and bringing into the mainstream, the fetishes people previously might have they were alone and “perverted” in. A major point of interest in the play is the sometimes thin line between what is considered a harmless sexual kink and what is a socially condemned perversion. This particularly comes to the fore in the relationship between John and Behrooz, which soured when the latter discovered John had downloaded fanfic whose contents could be potentially illegal, but a whole new light is shed on the situation by Behrooz’s feelings for Maggie. Shelford is here given a very on-the-nose (perhaps a bit unsubtly so) speech about the press’ hypocritical attitudes towards paedophiles and barely-legal starlets.
Maggie herself could have problems much greater than it appears when we first meet her, and Lourie gives a fantastic performance as we learn how deep-seated her insecurities are, how much the names she gets called at school have defined her, and how much her mother’s attitude of wanting to be her daughter’s best friend has missed exactly the kind of development it was meant to support. Parent-child relationships crop up elsewhere in the play as well, as Richard bemoans how badly he dealt with his own son’s coming out to him, and John wonders if the sexual feelings he’s ashamed of will make him a bad father to his unborn child. Everyday Maps for Everyday Use is a multi-layered piece with no easy answers that entertains even as it sometimes disturbs, and will hopefully get the bigger audience it deserves as the run continues.
**** Four Stars, Everything Theatre
Everyday Maps for Everyday Use, Finborough Theatre
Tom Morton-Smith
Directed by Beckie Mills
Pros: Fascinating script and great acting.
Cons: It’s a shame there is nowhere to have a drink before the show!
Our Verdict: A great piece of new writing. Don’t miss this one.
It was with great regret that I arrived at the Finborough to find that the wine bar which used to be below the theatre has gone into administration (a less successful by-product of the Olympics we’re told). I hadn’t been to this wonderful venue for a few months, and although I had heard that the Finborough Wine Café would be closing, it wasn’t until I arrived that the reality of the situation hit me. Thankfully, London’s finest off-West End theatre continues to function to its usual high standards, but we do hope that the bar below re-opens soon! Despite our sorrows, it was a very pleasant and thought-provoking trip to the Finborough for the production of a new piece of writing, Everyday Maps for Everyday Use.
The play is set in Woking, which, as some of you may know, is the place where the Martian invasion begins in HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. The story revolves around a 16 year old Girl, Maggie, who has found a warm patch in Horsell Common – the very spot where the invasion begins in Wells’ novel – where she believes something alien is buried. This is where she meets Behrooz, an artist who spends his evenings mapping the surface of Mars. Everyday Maps for Everyday Use is ultimately a story about sex, or more precisely an exploration into the nature of sexual desire. Maggie has unusual fantasies, and using this as a starting point, Morton-Smith takes a closer look at some of the more taboo aspects of the human psyche. This script is very well written, especially given that the subject matter is rather delicate. Morton-Smith manages to write about this very tastefully, never going over the top but never shying away from difficult concepts either. It is a carefully crafted script which will certainly get you thinking.
Because of the content of the play, the director would have had a particularly tough task in staging this show. Thankfully, Beckie Mills achieves this masterfully – the cast hit the perfect balance, and deliver honest, emotional and sometimes humourous performances. They make the most of the complex script, and are a pleasure to watch. Skye Lourie, who plays Maggie, has a particularly challenging part (how does one portray an emotionally unhinged teenager with an alien tentacle fetish?!) but Lourie rises to the task fearlessly, showing her skill as an actress with a poignant and honest performance. Other excellent portayals come from Moncef Mansur as the artist Behrooz, caught up in a dilemma about Maggie, and Cosima Shaw as Maggie’s mother, who has a few sexual kinks of her own. Hats off to them and indeed to the entire cast for their polished performances.
Overall, Everyday Maps for Everyday Use is a fascinating production, due to both the challenging script and the high standard of the acting. The usual attention to detail which we have come to expect of the Finborough is of course adhered to: the set is neatly designed and aesthetically impeccable, and the show is superbly lit. As usual, it is an excellent example of the best of London theatre. Make sure you catch this one, but remember to keep an open mind. And don’t be squeamish!
Alban – the World Premiere, St Albans Cathedral (May 2009)
19 October, 2012“Young British composer Tom Wiggall has served up a cogent chamber opera worthy of Britten’s Church Parables. Admirably structured around a wittily unsentimental libretto by award-winning poet John Mole, Wiggall’s score freshly persuades at every turn…Director Beckie Mills had her alert large chorus marshalled in impressive detail: slyly plotted, all action relevant….Dominique Thiebaud (Alban’s wife) shines amid six strong principals and a bevy of believable youngsters (notably Alban’s Miles and Flora-like children), drilled to perfection. This piece should travel (Buxton, York, the Linbury Studio in Covent Garden). It betokens great expectations of composer and producers alike.” Roderic Dunnett, Opera Now.
I Was a Beautiful Day, Finborough Theatre & Tron (June-July 2009, April 2010)
19 October, 2012**** Four Stars Whatsonstage.com “Beckie Mills’ direction rarely falters in a production that does justice to the Finborough’s reputation as one of the ‘most stimulating venues in London’.’” Alex MacDonald, Whatsonstage.
“Impeccably played by all concerned and wonderfully evocative of the Scottish islands and their place in history….This is a wonderfully lyrical evocation of what it is to belong, and is at once both moving and uplifting.” Michael Spring, Theatreworld.
Love on the Dole, Finborough Theatre (September-October 2010)
19 October, 2012**** Four Stars, The Evening Standard “It’s little wonder that Love on the Dole, written in 1935 by Walter Greenwood and Ronald Gow, was voted one of the National Theatre’s 100 plays of the 20th century. What is a surprise is that no theatre larger than the Finborough has seen fit to mount Beckie Mills’s spirited, timely revival of this raw cry of anguish from the sharp end of 1930s working-class life. Grimly essential viewing.” Fiona Mountford, The Evening Standard
“Magical…an unexpected joy; a blast of rough-and-ready exuberance and creativity and passion and it made me feel proud to be a member of the human race.” Daisy Waugh, The Sunday Times
“First performed in 1934, Greenwood and Ronald Gow’s stage adaptation of the book is here revived with sensitivity, the play bringing a humbling perspective to our current economic climate.” Georgine Evenden, Music OMH
“I can’t remember seeing a more moving production than this one, fringe or otherwise… The acting is thoroughly convincing and the action, though simple, is gripping, signifying that Beckie Mills’ directing is also astute.”…There is absolutely nothing I can fault in regard to this production, apart from the fact that if you don’t go and see it, you’ll be depriving yourself of a very memorable evening of theatre – a rare event not only destined to remind you of the magic theatre itself is capable of, but also one designed to encourage its audiences to shake off their numbing shrouds of complacency.” Mary Couzens, ExtraExtra
“It quickly became clear that this is a play, and a production, with much more than timeliness going for it. It’s a gripping, human drama, and most of the melodrama comes from the all too genuine drama of the desperate poverty of 1930s…This is a production that deserves that transfer to a bigger venue for a longer run.” Natalie Bennett, UK Arts Grants Finder
