A bitter comic clash between fairytale and real life
Sleeping Beauty is a story about a princess but in Colette Garrigan’s stunning solo version of the tale, presented by Compagnie Akselere of France during the final weekend of Manipulate 2019, this little princess is born not into a palace but into a part of working-class Bootle where life can only get worse, as the 1960s fade into the 1970s and Eighties.
As the show opens, Garrigan takes possession of the stage like a black-clad head waitress; there is a table, with cutlery, glasses and napkins. In no time at all, though, her story – stunningly lit by Laurent Filo and Franck Bourget – begins to transform those everyday objects into looming towers and dungeons, full of the dark magic that must be overcome if fairytales are to have their happy ending; and the sheer inventiveness of Garrigan’s approach is often stunning, as she switches from powerful shadow-theatre and direct monologue to occasional moments of pure puppetry.
Beneath the inventiveness, though, there lies the bitter comic clash between the language of fairytale and the reality of Garrigan’s life in hard-up 1970s Liverpool and, beyond that again, her passionate and beautiful insistence that this is nevertheless a true princess’s story. By the end, when our heroine pricks her arm on a drug-dealer’s needle and almost loses her life before it has begun, it’s impossible to forget the image of a workingclass tale that seizes hold of the storytelling magic British culture so often reserves for those already touched by the fairy dust of wealth and privilege; and in true revolutionary style, claims that magic for its own.
If Garrigan’s courage in putting herself and her story centre-stage matches the radical mood of this year’s festi-
val, Manipulate nonetheless still makes plenty of room for traditional puppetry and body-play. It was a delight, for example, to glimpse the work of the English company Invisible Thread, who presented a gorgeous short dark fairytale called Catmother alongside some traditional absurdist puppetry, exploring territory somewhere between Samuel Beckett and Harry Worth.
And in a show that pointed the way towards Manipulate festivals of the future, the young Scottish group Hopeful Monster presented Transmographiles, a piece of 21st-century theatre created entirely through six moving human hands; and designed to celebrate the animal kingdom to which our bodies so obviously belong, and which we now stand to lose, unless we learn how to strengthen that sense of kinship, and to act on it.
JOYCE MCMILLAN The final performance of Manipulate 2019 is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, tomorrow evening