THEATRE

Thirteen characters, verbatim stories and a banjo are used to articulate the environmental concerns at heart in the American coal fields of the Appalachian region of the mountains of West Virginia and Kentucky.

Yes this show was environmentally informative, and you get free oatmeal and raisin cookies which tasted amazing, but Adelind Horan was an awful entertainer, and in a one woman show it is more than slightly detrimental to the piece if the actor in question is terrible.

The piece did not attempt anything creative, it was incredibly simplistic, but negatively so. The structure was formulaic, and she attempted nothing original with her costume changes; which were the only real indicator of a character change, as her characterisation was so weak, and her voice remained a constant drawl. On the odd occasion that her voice took on a different inflection, within seconds it slid back to her base tone which was incessantly dull. She was not a natural performer, and I found myself counting down the characters on the program until the end.

Most awkwardly, she attempted comedy, and although this was a one-woman show plus a banjo man thrown onstage for good measure, she lacked stage presence, and often I found it more interesting to watch the silent banjo man. Her comic timing was as off-beat as her tambourine playing which she also managed to shake out of time.

In attempt to make the show more engaging, she threw in some props which she handed out to the audience, but they were redundant. They served no purpose, so people were given emotive banners but nothing came of this. It seemed as if she missed an opportunity for audience participation, which could have been engaging, but it wasn’t.

What was intended as the crux of the performance (marked by banjo playing either side of the monologue entitled ‘Possum Buddy, you okay?’) I found un-stirring. She groped for the poignancy in the tale about a young girl crying as a result of the damaging health concerns of the mining, but her delivery of the story was so forced. I could see her struggling not to blink for some time in a pathetic attempt to cry, so she might as well have opened a jar of tiger balm and smeared in across her retina for all the subtlety of the act. As the conceiver and actor of the material, she struggled to find any emotional pull in the verbatim story, so naturally I did too.

I think the play would have been better suited in America, the issue is too distant to strike a note with a British audience, and I was only acutely moved by the knowledge of the mining’s destruction, but I think this was largely due to Adelind’s un-motivational and un-engaging performance. The cookies were really good though.