The Off-Off-Off-Broadway Company makes its Isle of Wight debut this August with a brand new show at Ventnor Fringe Festival.
The award-winning* company’s latest piece is ‘Hidden Mother’, a darkly funny drama with a splash of cabaret, will be performed at Pier Street Playhouse at 8pm on 12th, 13th, 14th August.
Asylum patient
Inspired by Barbara Taylor’s memoir ‘The Last Asylum’, not to mention the fates of post-Revolution Russian aristocrats, it tells the story of Diana (played by Laura Louise Baker), a patient in one of England’s last remaining asylums, which is now heading for closure.
Diana, who has blurred the fact and fiction in her life, believes she is a cabaret singer descended from the persecuted Russian nobility. As she faces being ousted from her only haven, she must confront her real memories of life with an unstable mother, as well as the prospect of losing her only friend, Leon — a depressive who is also, in Diana’s cabaret fantasies, her pianist.
Importance of friendship
Playwright Polis Loizou, who plays Leon in the show, says,
“I was very moved by Barbara Taylor’s story.
“Aside from making me angry about the funding cuts and dwindling services available for mental health, it highlighted to me the importance of a factor that’s often neglected from discussion (and much research): friendship.”
As Barbara Taylor argues, the importance of an understanding ‘community’ in a mental health institution can’t be understated. As such, the closure of asylums in the 1990s was a real blow to many patients, who not only lost the comfort of their ‘stone mother’ (the asylum itself) but also their friends; people like them, who understood what it was to be ‘mad’.
Why the Bolsheviks?
Loizou continues,
“I happened to become very interested in the Russian Revolution of 1917, and what happened to the country’s noble classes under the Bolsheviks.
“It then occurred to me to marry these two historical instances of people being cast out, and the piece developed from there.”
A new challenge
While The Off-Off-Off-Broadway Company has performed one-man shows, two-handers and three-handers, this marks the first time Jaacq Hugo will not be physically on stage for the piece. Instead his character of Z., Diana’s private psychoanalyst, will be present only via audio.
For a company that has dabbled with video projection, audience participation, improv and outdoor installation, this is simply a new challenge.
‘Hidden Mother’ not only aims to add its own voice to the debate on mental health cuts, but to do so with humour and — thanks to Diana’s cabaret fantasies — a little music.
Book now!
Performances take place on 12th, 13th, 14th August, 8pm.
Tickets are £9 (£7 conc.) available from the Ventnor Fringe Website.
* The John Beecher Memorial Award, Buxton Fringe Festival; Best Comedy Show, Greater Manchester Fringe Festival (both for ‘Back Door’, 2014).
