Writer: Amy Townsend-Lowcock
The Townsends’s were the first black British family to move onto their estate, and it didn’t start well. A petition had been got up to stop them moving there. But there were eight of them – mum, dad and six kids – and they stuck it out together. My Fruits offers an insight into one family’s experience of racism and assimilation in 1970s England.
The Townsends’ story is told as an audio soundtrack, experienced through headphones for twelve people at a time with an accompanying film and live film animation. It’s an engaging and intimate forty-five minute story of the strength of human spirit.
So it should be powerful and emotive.
We file into a studio theatre space after waiting in a queue outside well past the time on the ticket. There’s a long table covered in a black cloth. At each end is a screen. We put on headphones. The screen at one end of the table shows a tabletop, filmed from above, covered with stones and a variety of fruit, each representing people in the story. As it unfolds, they’re moved around live from somewhere in the darkness of the theatre – although if the artist hadn’t emerged from behind the screen at the end, and an audience member hadn’t asked, we would never have known that the performance was live. The opposite screen shows a recorded film of the artist reading into a microphone. While the script, written in the second person, is compelling enough, it’s hard to know why the artist has chosen to deliver it in a detached and passionless monotone.
The ’immersive’ nature of the work, though, is what most fails it. The space is uncomfortable. The screens are at a ninety degree angle to the table and the film moves from one to the other. The bright projector light behind one screen makes the image difficult to look at. It’s had to know if this is all deliberately constructed to create unease or whether it’s just bad design. Either way, it distracts from the potential power of the performance.
The show is somewhat redeemed by the appearance in the second half of the family themselves. In on-screen interviews they tell fragments of the story we’ve just heard, in their own words. They tell of tears and triumph, how they got through the bad times and made their own good times. How they can look back at terrible things that happened in the knowledge that things have, at least, changed. In the final moments we see all the siblings together, laughing and powerful, creating a family portrait in the place they made their home.
While there are interesting themes and ideas here, My Fruits feels like a work in progress that hasn’t quite decided what it is. It’s subtleties, and its potential power, are lost in the tricksy, over-complicated production. It’s a rather frustrating missed opportunity of a show.
Runs until 11 February 2023
