Theatre Review: Blackout and Baggy Bra at the HYSTERIA Festival

Hosted by the Old Rep Theatre, HYSTERIA is a week-long, women-led festival celebrating the diversity and creativity of female-identifying actors, directors, and comedians in the theatre industry. We attended the festival’s Wednesday evening shows: Blackout and Baggy Bra. Although HYSTERIA Festival seems like a great concept and spotlighting female creatives and works within theatre is incredibly important, we were left somewhat disappointed by our experience, although we may just have been unlucky with our choice of acts.

Blackout

Presented by Untamed Productions, Blackout is a two-person play about friends Tilly and JJ. The play presents the two friends coping with the realities and pressures that come with turning 30, namely the struggles of being single and the societal shame associated with this. Both Tilly and JJ approach their impending 30th birthdays with different perspectives: whilst Tilly increasingly feels she is being left behind from her peers, donned with a sign round her neck that reads SINGLE in the opening scene, JJ enjoys the freedom of her current ‘complicated’ situationship.

However, the one thing that the friends certainly have in common is their love to drink. Presented as a coping mechanism to escape the reality of their current lives, scene after scene Tilly and JJ hit the club and dance the night away, proceeding to black out each time. The production in these scenes was both effective and fun: accompanied by disco-like lighting and booming pop hits ranging from Whitney Houston to Tinie Tempah, their purposefully over-the-top dance moves and lip syncing were all-too recognisable and relatable.

The play has its fair share of memorable scenes. JJ mouthing along to the words of Lily Allen’s ‘22’ before panicking as she finds herself relating to each lyric was particularly entertaining and well-acted. A conversation between the friends regarding the economic benefits awarded to couples, such as couples railcards, was both humorous and thought-provoking. A personal standout was the scene of JJ’s doctor’s appointment where she receives news that she has polycystic ovary syndrome, whilst being spot lit centre stage. With overlapping voices informing her of the diagnosis, this made for a particularly emotive scene that dealt with the complexities of womanhood and female sexual health (an often taboo topic) convincingly.

The play has its fair share of memorable scenes

However, the show as a whole ultimately felt unoriginal and, therefore, disappointing, as it was unclear exactly what the play’s intended takeaways were. The director merely intending to mock the protagonists for their obsessiveness with turning 30 and being single seems improbable. It simply felt as though, for the most part, the play consisted of surface-level conversations between two young women, primarily on the topic of men. At one point, JJ joked that Tilly wouldn’t pass the Bechdel Test, but honestly, the play as a whole probably only just gets through. As a result, though almost certainly unintentional, this both contradicted and undermined the central ethos of the festival as a whole.

Rating: 2.5/5

Baggy Bra

Unfortunately, the standard of the evening did not pick up with its second performance, Baggy Bra. Billed as a ‘body positive witty show with a warm heart,’ and working to raise money for their charity partner Against Breast Cancer, we had hopes that this could be an informative but comedic play raising awareness about regularly checking for signs of breast cancer and also the importance of wearing the correct bra size (as we were repeatedly reminded, both during the play and from promotional material, that 8 out of 10 women wear the wrong bra size.) Hoping to take away information about breast health from an enjoyable performance, what we instead watched was a poorly acted, poorly scripted play about a mother and daughter running a bra shop.

Hoping to take away information about breast health from an enjoyable performance, what we instead watched was a poorly acted, poorly scripted play about a mother and daughter running a bra shop

The play explored the relationship between these two, as well as a handful of other fairly uninteresting characters from the small Welsh village in which it was set. It lacked any sort of engaging or coherent plot, ultimately centring on how neither of the two protagonists really wanted to be running the bra shop, and at times some of the acting was a little painful to watch. Although the premise of the show seemed promising, the actual performance was neither entertaining nor educational.