Now or Never – Barn Theatre, Cirencester

Picture: Jenya Steanson

Now or Never was streamed from the Barn Theatre, Cirencester.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Since the start of the first lockdown over a year ago, Cirencester’s Barn Theatre has led the way in finding avenues for live theatre in a socially distanced world. Be that live circus shows, YouTube reimaginings of Shakespearean monologues, or interactive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style cabarets, this is one venue that’s not chosen to wait it out.

One of their latest ventures is a colloboration with associate artist Matthew Harvey, a singer-songwriter who has created Now or Never, a song cycle about responses to a global adversity.

And while the words “global adversity” might encourage one to think of the current pandemic, Harvey has astutely generalised the context for his 30-minute piece so that it may have a longer life, either has a whole or as individual songs. A framing device with actress Janie Dee playing a newsreader posits that Now or Never’s catastrophe is an extinction-level solar flare, but the nature of the threat is immaterial; all that matters is how Harvey’s characters respond to the threat.

A conventional performance of such a song cycle might present all numbers on a single stage, with a minimal set. Here, creative director Ryan Carter creates a series of small sets dotted around the Barn Theatre’s auditorium, front of house and backstage areas, allowing each number to have a dedicated staging. Director of photography Ben Collins moves the single handheld camera fluidly between spaces, presenting the whole piece as a single take.

And so we transition from Harvey himself, as a mechanic dreaming of travelling the open roads on his restored motorbike while he still can, to Katie Shearman performing a delightfully upbeat number about getting a dog, to Lucy St Louis musing on the end of a relationship with the plaintive ‘Words’, all in separate spaces of the Barn’s theatre complex.

Elsewhere, Eloise Davies, Courtney Stapleton and Irvine Iqbal provide other readings of numbers which illustrate Harvey’s ability to craft fine melodies with sharp, poignant lyrics. The solo numbers wrap up with perhaps the piece’s most relatable number, ‘More to Miles’.

Ahmed Hamad presents a character who finds himself stuck on the end of a Zoom call, wondering what he is doing with his life, before rage quitting in order to fully realise his dreams. It’s an act of wish fulfilment that all too many of us can relate to over the course of the last year where professional relationships have been reduced to squares on a screen.

And all too suddenly, Now or Never reaches its finale, the entire ensemble united on the Barn’s main stage for ‘Whatever Happens Next’, a rousing paean to the virtues of seizing the day. It’s Harvey’s best number of the cycle, with a stirring hook that leaves an earworm in one’s head long after the lights come down.

Now or Never was presented here as a one-off event, but the recording of this performance deserves a wider airing, just as Harvey’s work deserves greater exposure. Barring a real-life extinction-level event, one feels sure that this song cycle’s best days lie ahead.

Scott Matthewman