It would be easy to miss just how good Niki McCretton is. Easy to mistake her openness and generosity in performance for something facile. But nothing could be further from the truth. For McCretton is a rare performer, combining her ambient and dispersed material with an adorable presence. "Adorable" because it is simply good and close to painful to be in her stage presence. What she does with that presence strikes deep and you take it home with you. Relative is a deceptive piece. It's way out beyond the documentary it at first appears to be. It's really a kind of emotional-geographic entertainment that goes everywhere, inside and out. Towards the end of the show, there's a moment when the stage picture seems to bleed off into outer space --- somehow everything spreads ever wider and yet retains its friendly integrity. The angel is in the detail.
Relative is advertised as a show about grandparent/grandchild relations. It is far more ambitious and personal than that. Somehow it manages to do justice to its roots in a major community project in Morecambe while stratospherically transcending its material. Through dances, slapstick, casual chatter, reminiscence, showing of knickers, anticipations of regret, bingo, rituals, jelly babies, confessional, and powered-wheelchair choreography, it bridges personal meditations on aging and having - or maybe not having - children with a poignant and luxurious guide to emotional survival. By the end, we have arrived at an immersive world of charm and pain that one longs to bathe deeply in. Only such a star guide as McCretton would then allow a projected grandma to steal the show from under her nose as she does.
In this show, McCretton is perfectly complemented by Kathy Hinde who plays an adroit foil to McCretton; laconic and honest, she at first seems to be servicing the action, but increasingly takes hold of it, infiltrating her leads and plugs, her sounds and musics, into the dispersing and expanding world of the show. Superb.
(Review of performance held 31 October 2005 at Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter, Devon, UK. Reviewed by Phil Smith in the November 2005 issue of Total Theatre Magazine, a publication of Total Theatre Network of London, the UK’s lead body for physical and visual performance.)
They make an excellent double act: multimedia artist Kathy Hinde and dancer Niki McCretton. Chatting about incontinence pads, shopping and "grandpairings" (as they call the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren), the two artists have spark and sharpness. The duo have collaborated to make and perform Relative - a play about grandchildren, grandparents and grandmothers in particular. It is a patchwork quilt, a scrapbook of real and imagined memories and anecdotes about matriarchs. Using dance, puppetry, film, music and a large amount of housework, the performers brought to life the fascinating, the familiar and the fancies of the Morecambe grannies they had interviewed. Niki danced and chatted from her washing line set while Kathy sat in a granny-style area complete with bric-a-brac, controlling the music and film. There was a stunning ballet on a speeding shop-mobility buggie, a surprise game of audience bingo and an enchanting paper-puppet dance set in a tiny theatre. But there was a tendency to go for atmosphere and mood over storytelling at times, with a rambling sense of narrative for those used to plot and structure. As the piece unfolded, we witnessed Niki McCretton stiffening with age until she seemed bound by arthritic immobility. Sensitive, witty, interactive, original and utterly charming, this is an unusual piece of theatre.
(Review of performance held 12 November 2005 at Bridgwater Arts Centre, Bridgwater, Somerset, UK. Reviewed by Harry Mottram in the Western Daily Press, Bristol, UK. First published 17 November 2005.)
Niki McCretton and Kathy Hinde’s visually-stunning and beautifully-realised performance of Relative was one of the highlights of the On The Edge season at the Scarborough Campus. The pairing of Niki McCretton’s exquisite physicality, storytelling and humour with the sheer energy and inventiveness of Kathy Hinde’s musicality was as exhilarating and moving as the filmed pairings of grandparent and grandchild. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, not least from the group of four grandmothers who joined the student audience having read about the show in the local Scarborough paper.
(Review of performance held 09 November 2005. Reviewed by Jo Beddoe, Arts Projects Manager, School of Arts - Scarborough Campus - University of Hull - Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK.)
Photo by Mark Passmore
