Writer: Ed Cooke
Director: Giulia Hallworth
Over the past 11 years, the VAULT Festival has presented many bizarre shows, but none quite as strange as Hutchy The Hare. Infuriating and intriguing in equal measure, Scram & Scrum Theatre’s show is a bleak absurdist allegory of modern life.
Perry (green jumpsuit), Frog (yellow jumpsuit) and Beaver (pink jumpsuit) are trapped in an underground facility where they have to make a lavish dress each day. Every evening the garment is collected and then rated a score out of 10. If they score a 10 they will be released from their cell.
But, to be honest, life outside looks just as horrific, ruled, it seems, by a scary hare called Hutchy. The three men – or they could be children the way they dance and skip around their room – watch films of the outside, called the Play Garden, before they go to bed. Although reminiscent of ancient children’s TV shows Hutchy’s kingdom is sinister and false.
It’s a fascinating concept and there is something Kafkaesque in its nature when the men/boys await their score each night. However, you wish the actors would play it straighter at times, as the acting is broad and often annoying. Their childlike antics and affected voices as they adopt a ladybird that has made its way into the room through an air vent is beyond irritating and only goes to prove the point that adult actors should never take on the roles of kids.
Fortunately, the story makes up for the stylised acting and when, one day, their guard brings a client into the cell, the men see their chance to make their escape. These people from the outside are just as odd but as their guard, Joseph Guard gives a deliciously camp performance as he folds each day’s dress into a fancy box.
Writer Ed Cooke plays Beaver who is the most quiet of the three men/boys, and who believes that the outside world (or perhaps adulthood) is the utopia that Hutchy promises. But it’s clear that this trust is nothing more than a symptom of Stockholm syndrome. As Hutchy, Belway Dean-Stanton is suitably grotesque and in his mission to make the tailors produce better dresses he could easily be seen as the god of capitalism, to which wider society still kneels before.
Hutchy The Hare is the stuff of nightmares, and it won’t be easy to forget this show. Whether it’s any good or not is still up for discussion.
Runs until 19 March 2023
