Sarah Hamilton relates a story drawn from the annals of her family history. This original solo piece uses quirky and inventive staging, rhythmic language and multiple characters to stage the family myth of the Protestant Roussel family escaping from Huguenot France.
The staging centres around a barrel on which Hamilton wriggles and writhes as she enacts the various characters, the family who must flee France, the dragoons who chase them, the crooked boatman with whom they escape, the Donkey that carries them, the Parrot they meet in England, and everyone and everything else that forms the swashbuckling adventure. The barrel is the true star of the show, and over the course of the action it reveals many secret tricks and miniature fabric finger puppets play upon it as a stage.
The storytelling is very poetic, with a great deal of repetition: the words ‘pretty’, ‘crooked’, ‘lost’ coming up again and again; and sequences and phrases echoed and re-echoed. This effect is overused and becomes tiresome. Sometimes the determinedly romantic qualities of the language (I am reminded of myself as a sixteen year old girl) come between performer and audience, and I find myself wishing that more of the story was Hamilton addressing us in her own voice, as these moments feel fresh and fun.
Hamilton is an engaging performer with a wide and appealing smile. She shifts between narration, playing characters (sixteen of them, including the titular donkey and parrot) and moments of direct address. It is in this guise I find her most likeable, and her good-humoured asides about the adjustments she has made to the familial myth combat the earnestness of some of the narrative sequences. Various characters, notably the young French sons, are drawn in charming and tender detail; others, such as the donkey and parrot themselves, are in broader strokes that don’t bear up to repeated appearances.
In essence, this is an exciting story told with a great deal of heart by an engaging performer, and will be of interest to those who like imaginative staging practices, and tales of love, loss and adventure.
