By Sarah Guthrie.
Addicts of words and music who joined us at HotFest ‘21, may recall a quirky little poetry and music mash-up in the Marquee called Love, Lies and the Green-Eyed Monster. It featured Kenneth Bell, Petra Jones and esteemed local director Ben Jenkins.
Ben is a pianist, musical and theatre director, who has worked at the Royal Ballet School, the Bristol Old Vic and Tobacco Factory Theatres. He is musical director of numerous choirs and performer groups, including the Bristol Reggae Orchestra, and as a theatre director, his work includes Travels with my Aunt (Tawdry Lace Theatre at the Alma Tavern 2015) and Peer Gynt: A Re-imagining (Circle Theatre 2019).
Ben recently directed a production of Philip Ridley’s edgy and brilliant play Tender Napalm (2011), which was showing at the Alma Tavern Theatre in Clifton (7th – 11th March 2023). It starred Jack Bannell as ‘Man’ and Nina Bright as ‘Woman’. Produced by Misplaced Theatre, which, as their name suggests, consists of ‘misplaced’ Bristol creatives, it made for riveting viewing:
‘Is it love or is it mania?’: A heady mix of passion, hate, desire, revulsion, and everything in between, Tender Napalm leaves you asking that very question. It certainly packs a punch.
“I could squeeze a grenade up there”, the man proclaims, confident and arrogant – one of many violent metaphors. As the play continues, the woman savagely talks of retaliative castration, in what feels like poetic justice among the thick layers of misogyny that characterise the play’s pacey, psychotic dreamscape. The black, bare stage setting provides a blank, if sinister, canvas on which strong, carefully crafted words create a brutal auditory imagery. The effect is to cause one to question the fabric of reality, and the role words alone play in our visual perception of the world, and in thought generally. A universe of serpents, unicorns and deathly encounters unfolds. The high energy performances of both actors allow the audience to ride the tsunami of their relationship, become the ultimate third wheel and spiral in the microcosm of insanity that may or may not be love.
Sometimes tricky to follow, and skilfully exhausting throughout, this is a play that confronts (without apology) the dynamic intersection of passionate (maybe violently passionate) love for another, and that hinterland of toxicity – the tender napalm, I guess – of when relational and psychic boundaries are breached leading to that perverse and mad discourse of primitive relativity. The play’s power lies exactly in the fact that it is not comfortable viewing, that it makes you tolerate incongruous nuances and paradoxes. It’s a hard, tender play. But those who, like me, enjoy the strangely abstract and dangerously absurd will probably love it. I cannot wait to see what Misplaced Theatre produces next.
Check out Events 2023 on the HotFest website to see what theatre, spoken word and music acts we’ve got lined up each month at HotFest on the Barge and HotFest on the Hill, and at the HotFest Big Weekend, 29th September – 1st October ’23!