Others, presented by Paper Birds, performed at the Ustinov

This was a play that I would never have expected to have seen. An innovative new way of performing something so real and impacting on society so much, was demonstrated at the Ustinov. The theatre company, Paper Birds, came up with a fantastic idea of speaking to the audience and telling them of the challenge and project they had set up for themselves. It involved reaching out to people who have no voice, and placing their voice on stage. This voice is then heard and their society and culture understood.
3 very different women had their voice performed. An Iranian housewife, a woman convicted of murdering her husband and serving life in prison and the celebrity Heather Mills. They were brought to life in a very stylised manner of physical movement and monologues. The imagination involved showed comedy and tragedy so sensitively that it never insulted the character. There was never a moment of confusion or boredom. The 4 women automatically gripped you from the beginning using their naturalistic and interactive skills that blended in to the acting and story line. There were so many little things that I loved, such as seeing a bird’s eye view of a woman reading the letter on a table and the flowing and spinning movement of another moment of reading a letter. The mimed physical violence was so vicious to a point that was almost too much to bare, as it went on and on and on. You just did not know when it was going to stop. Then there were other times where the actors would come out of character and talk to each other on stage. For example, when the Iraqi woman (Maryam Hamidi) playing the Iranian housewife was trying to justify and identify the difference in her culture to the audience and Shane Durrant, the piano man, would come in with gently mood intensifying music, she would ask him to stop as she felt it was not necessary for that moment. He repeatedly kept doing this, until she became really angry to show the audience how genuine her anger and emotions were. There was so much truth in what they performed, bringing in real life characters such as Heather Mills and it was brilliant the way they used media (which is how most of us see her life through) to show us her story and persona. I would love to see this play again and again. The idea of having missed every little detail on stage horrifies me. I never wanted the performance to end.