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Mouthpiece

 
Alice Carlill Review by Alice Carlill 5 Published: 22 Aug 2017 CanadaHub @ King's Hall in association with Summerhall Show Dates: 3 Aug 2017-27 Aug 2017

Mouthpiece is one of the shows at CanadaHub at King’s Hall, a venue in association with Summerhall. It is a piece of theatre by Quote Unquote Collective and Why Not Theatre. It is also one of the most informed, empathetic, complex articulations of female selfhood and female voices that I have ever seen, and my review will, as such, never do it justice. Go and see it (although I’m pretty sure that it will sell out very soon, if it hasn’t already).

Every friend I know who has seen Mouthpiece has ranked it amongst their top picks of the Fringe. So, go.

Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava have constructed a phenomenal performance piece in order to investigate and unpack the female psyche and female body. It is a piece of theatre that becomes more fertile each time you return to it, offering more to me each time I reconsider it – but this is the least of its many praises. Nostbakken and Sadava use beautiful a-capella harmonies, choreography and physical theatre so in sync that you’re left blinking in silent appreciation, and a searingly insightful text to construct their theatrical exploration. They both play Cassandra, a woman whose mother has recently died, and who is trying, desperately, to write her mother’s eulogy. But how, Cassandra asks, can anyone give voice to a woman, when she herself is spoken forth by society itself? Doesn’t the act of embodiment always produce an ambiguous lack, a split between the signifier and the signified? It is to this elasticity of language that Mouthpiece points, and the corporeal and vocal splitting of Cassandra into two women onstage is a physical symbol of this duplicity – of the simultaneously potentializing and reductive power of language. It really reminds me of the poet Denise Riley’s poem ‘Pythian’.

Even the decision to name their heroine Cassandra alludes to the intricacies of how women are socially, culturally and linguistically produced – and Mouthpiece is very aware of the position of privilege from which it speaks. At one point, Cassandra comments that “when I look at my own body, I imagine my eyes are his cameras’, inflecting the late John Berger’s comments on nude vs. naked women. Later, one-half of Cassandra reminds the other that she is a white, cis, heteronormative woman from Canada, who has received arts funding and whom all the audience have paid to see. It’s not fair, she says, when a woman speaks her mind and is beaten, raped, lynched for it. It’s not fair, she suggests, when a woman has learned how to self-construct as a woman in a man’s world, but at least she can rage against the injustice of this, and produce acts of protest and inquisition like Mouthpiece.

Mouthpiece is an extraordinary, intellectual investigation into femaleness and femininity. There’s not much more that can be said: it would be a deep injustice. The review itself, then, meta-linguistically reflects the inability of Cassandra’s mother’s eulogy to match up to the woman. Every friend I know who has seen Mouthpiece has ranked it amongst their top picks of the Fringe. So, go.

Amir Nisi

Alice Carlill

Alice has enjoyed theatre since she was cast as Bill Sykes in her year 5 production of Oliver Twist. She likes to imagine that her performance skills have progressed since then, as she still enjoys acting in amdram, but who knows. She attends London theatre at least once a week and encourages everyone else to also try to see as much as possible, believing it to be one of the most urgent, inflammatory artistic mediums that engenders real critical involvement and engagement from audiences. And god knows, we need that right now.

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The Blurb:

After numerous North American tours, the critically acclaimed, multi award-winning Mouthpiece makes its UK premiere. Mouthpiece follows one woman, for one day, as she tries to find her voice. Two performers express the inner conflict that exists within a modern woman’s head: the push and the pull, the past and the present, the progress and the regression. Interweaving a cappella harmony, dissonance, text and physicality, Mouthpiece is a harrowing, humorous, and heart-wrenching journey into the female psyche. 'One of the most incisive comments about contemporary womanhood that I've ever heard' (MyEntertainmentWorld.com).
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