Cautionary Tales for Daughters – Songs Your Mother Never Taught You continues at theSpace @ Surgeons Hall until 29 August.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Tanya Holt is a beguiling charmer – she looks her audience straight in the eye and urges us to tell ourselves it’s 8 o’clock in the evening, not 10-ish,ish in the morning. Her desire to impart some wisdom to her 9-year-old daughter is declared the root of this show, to: “say some nasty things in the comfort of a song.”
The stage resembles a cross between a Cath Kidston catalogue and a hand-coloured sepia photograph. Both Holt and her accompanist, Suzie Shrubb, are dressed in the turquoise and pinks that evoke the nostalgic yet bang up-to-date dialectic that the show also encapsulates. The animated storybook projection is a very clever addition: never dominating, but gently supporting the atmosphere of the songs.
Engagement with the audience starts early on: urging people to share any nuggets of advice they would pass on. Then there is the ‘human wind machine’ – large turquoise lily-pad shaped fans wafted towards Holt by members of the audience to create a Stevie-Nicks-style wind machine effect, beautifully depicted in the storybook projections, too. Fair to say, Holt doesn’t take herself too seriously!
Jazzy little costume touches such as the tiny horse on Holt’s Barbie-pink cowboy hat, keep up with the entertainment level in the songs – a great deal of thought and care has been taken with every element in the show. This is both a delight and has been partly responsible for the challenge the show poses: the lightness of touch needs a more satisfactory through line of chat to support where the songs take us. Alongside warnings such as: “She’d use all things designer/To create and define her,” we need some more positive views of the girl becoming the woman. The closest we get is the frustrated cowgirl/tomboy who is coerced to conform to ‘princess’ mode.
Entertaining, witty and almost reaching that special place that has something of import to shake up our thinking of how we treat our daughters.
Fiona Orr
Fair Warning
SHARE THIS POST:
Comments are closed.