Creator: Marianne Tuckman
A woman in a blue-green silk jumpsuit lies on top of a tall spot-lit stepladder, wilting into the metal bars. This is Marianne Tuckman, whose airy performance mixes dance and drama, laughter and dreams. The only props are two pineapples, representing the protagonist’s children, and a smartphone on which she sobs to her absent husband: “the house is really filthy … it’s like the street has come inside.” Pervasive dirt is an image of environmental destruction.
The climate crisis is a global issue and a lonely catastrophe. It’s a crucial topic, but difficult to stage. In this ambitious hour-long, one-woman show, Tuckman wisely harnesses warmth and comedy to suggest chilling questions: how do humans respond to this shared emergency? What does the future look like and is it right to have kids?
There are memorable turns of phrase. The woman is: “dragging her carbon behind her, like a silver locket worn backwards, the size and shape of an albatross.” There are also sequences where language breaks down into repeated phrases, muttering, guttural noises, light-footed dancing and writhing, squirming movement. The show becomes frenetic in places, hallucinatory in others, deliberately fragmenting. But Tuckman also keeps a certain lightness of touch running through to the heart-breaking conclusion.
The first half of the evening’s entertainment is a bonus dance performance by upbeat cartoonish duo Áine Reynolds and Ruby Portus. Their comic mimes and gameshow silliness make a suitable foil for the more serious themes in the main show.
This staging of The Dirt is a preemptive volley from new company HEXIS Productions, officially launching in Berlin this summer. The team includes producer Belisa Branças, rehearsal director Marco Gonzales, and four other young creatives. Artistic director of HEXIS, Tuckman plays all the characters in The Dirt and is a thoroughly engaging performer. Graduating from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in 2015, her projects have since appeared across Europe and South America. An Arts Council grant enabled her to develop this show, with its pandemic echoes, in 2022.
Nicolas San Martin’s lighting for The Dirt matches Tuckman’s dynamism. Impressive sound design by Marcelo Schmittner Daza includes deftly-integrated music, unsettling noises, and a sequence where the woman’s non-binary cleaner is interviewed by a child/pineapple. As they describe their squalid, rat-ridden squat and eviction threats, the child plaintively repeats “Not so cosy”. At another moment, the soundtrack is dominated by inhaling and exhaling, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s short play Breath. This is a bold, experimental show from a talented team.
Runs until 4 February 2026
