Narcissus – VAULT Festival, London

Writer: Ruby Wednesday

Directors: Ruby Wednesday and Joanna Vymeris

Ruby Wednesday has recorded a new album and called it Narcissus. They have launched it at the VAULT Festival, in a concert-cum-mixed-media extravaganza. There is aerial work, fire-eating, poetry, and tale-telling in amongst the sequence of songs that is the main focus of the evening.

Ruby Wednesday takes the stage, blue-dyed hair, sharp suit, and killer stilettos, in front of a three-piece band that features the record’s composer, Russell Lanigan, on guitar. There are the usual accoutrements of an electric band – monitors, effects pedals, coils of cable – and a couple of vases of flowers. There should be a flame-proof pot, it turns out, though stage-managerial oversight left that behind.

As they sing their songs, darkness and despair high in the mix, the stage is approached by a number of exotic creatures who are eldritch and mysterious, occult avatars bringing illustrative circus skills to the stage. They are aerialists Lauren Jamieson and Saya Yamaguchi, and cabaret performer Molly Beth Morossa, collectively the Feathers of Daedalus. Lauren Jamieson performs a creditable and intense straps act, Saya Yamaguchi flies by her hair, Molly Beth Morossa eats fire. The three of them are spectral and creepy, and give personified presence to the spectral, creepy songs.

Ruby Wednesday tells stories of their life, introduces us to their parents, reads poems inspired by cards from the Tarot, and generally owns the stage while rock bands and cabaret circus acts happen around them. It’s a whirling, speedy show, somewhat unfocused, somewhat self-indulgent, but entertaining and occasionally dipping into discussion of self-harm and gender fluidity, topics which are handled sensitively and with grace.

The performance elements of the show are rather perfunctory, bolt-ons that don’t do much more than illustrate the occult topics that the songs explore. The lighting is the usual shocking rock’n’roll mish-mash, pointing vaguely at areas of the stage that may accidentally contain a performer and spending lots of time wandering round the auditorium. They signally fail to illuminate the aerialists at the high points of their routines. The lights do, however, pick out the pot in which Ruby Wednesday burns slips of paper on which audience members have written their fears and doubts, and then plants narcissi on the ashes. It is the closing image of the show, picked out in a beautifully focussed spotlight. It is a haunting and well-executed moment in a show full of ideas that are a bit too random to register.

Runs until 18 March 2023