Writer/Director: Javaad Alipoor
Fiona Mozley’s award-winning debut novel, Elmet, was greeted with much enthusiasm in 2017, but it is not the sort of thing that transfers easily to the stage. In fact for the Javaad Alipoor Company’s production as part of Bradford’s 2025 City of Culture the original concept is credited to Javaad Alipoor. The main difference, it seems, is to transform a mythic story of identity and memory into a tragedy. The result is an ambitious, but not wholly successful, version of the novel.
What it is not, deliberately, is naturalistic. At the start L.J. Parkinson talks to us about the nature of the play: they are playing Danny, Jennifer Jackson is his sister Cathy, but the other main character, Daddy, is too big to be played by one person – for the most part, we have to imagine him. After the interval Jackson, out of character, gives us a slide show in which she explains an episode in the novel which worries her, an example of man terrorising woman sexually that ended in tragedy. At the end actors again step out of character to take us to an unresolved conclusion.
The story of Elmet concerns two young people (at the time of these events, as Parkinson explains, about 17 and 15) who have been brought up away from modern life by their father, Daddy, who has built their house in the woods himself and is monstrously strong and somehow involved with Mr. Price who exploits the poor farmers and buys up their land. Daddy joins with Ewart, a neighbour, to form a collective against Price. Then the focus shifts to Daddy being recruited by Mr. Price to fight an Eastern European giant – the reward for victory to be getting his property back. He wins, but after that everything falls apart. Fear of spoilers stops the account of the plot here, but at the end Danny is the only one of the family certainly left alive.
There are many stories hinted at in the dialogue and the mystery of the whole thing is enhanced by Deb Pugh’s direction of the cast’s movement and by the presence of the Unthanks and Adrian McNally with songs and instrumental accompaniment.
Parkinson brings out the otherness of Danny, revealing their agony by exploiting the full range of their voice from whispers to shouted agony. Jennifer Jackson’s wild troubled energy is totally effective as Cathy and strong support comes from Sean Jackson (whose Mr. Price is as menacing in quiet passages as in violent outbursts), Gabriella Schmidt and Tom Varey.
The non-naturalistic action, with Cathy climbing all over the set, is effective, but the overall sense of menace, giving way to melodrama, is a bit hard to take.
Runs until 2 November 2025
