Taking creativity to the Max
THE Nico Project, world premiered at MIF19 (Manchester International Festival 2019), is a stunning tour de force of Maxine Peake’s creative abilities.
In collaboration with director Sarah Frankcom, composer Ann Clyne and writer EV Crowe, she has created a moving, challenging, at times uncomfortable but thoroughly engaging exploration of the troubled, complex mind of Nico (Christa Päffgen).
Nico, who lived in Manchester during the 1980s, is probably best known for the Andy Warhol produced seminal album The Velvet Underground and Nico.
She was also an actor, a
model, a heroin addict and a muse for such as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, who both wrote songs about her.
Following her stint with Lou Reed, John Cale et al, Nico made the Marble Index, although ignored at the time, is now revered as a defining masterpieces of 1960s counterculture.
It’s a collection of songs immersed in hauntingly bleak but beautiful strings and her trademark harmonium.
It is the Marble Index, one of Maxine Peake’s favourite albums, that provides the inspiration for the Nico Project.
Composer Ann Clyne has created a score that eerily echoes the sounds that were in Nico’s head, played superbly by an all-female ensemble of highly talented students from the Northern College of Music.
They create the perfect setting for Maxine Peake’s channelling of Nico’s troubled thoughts, underpinned by Ellen Beth Abdi and Phoebe May Maddison’s haunting vocals.
Nico’s dark and despairing lyrics form the basis of EV Crowe’s script, stunningly interpreted by Maxine Peake, using her own voice then uncannily producing Nico from deep inside her.
Maxine Peake is incredible, you can’t take your eyes of her as she talks to herself out loud, commanding the stage with movements that eloquently depict Nico’s whirlpool of emotions then suddenly morph into a truly commanding conductor of her ethereal music.
This all-female team have created a haunting, memorable exploration of an enigmatically complicated and contradictory artist, powerful yet vulnerable, driven yet lost, impossible to categories and difficult to understand.
For MIF19, Maxine Peake and Sarah Francom have produced a piece of immersive theatre that will long live in the minds of all who were lucky enough to see it. You leave the Stoller Hall knowing nothing more about Nico’s life or her time in Manchester but with the experience of time spent in Nico’s head.
A mind encompassing alienation, discomfort and beauty. but powerful