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What ever happened to Harmony Banks?

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 3 Published: 8 Aug 2025 Assembly @ Dance Base Show Dates: 5 Aug 2025-10 Aug 2025

Tess Letham has genius-level comic timing and a dazzling ability for the ‘just so slightly off reality’ school of clowning. She can make adjusting a prop into a comic opera in itself.

Genius-level comic timing

The show includes the destruction of the dance styles of all contemporary female pop stars, with video clips that should make Instagram stars give up – their jobs have been demolished.

The show examines the fall from grace of media star Harmony Banks. We watch her in interviews, nights out, and celebrity appearances, and are treated to a spectacularly incoherent chat-show sequence, with references to one actor’s famously unhinged interview acrobatics.

We get the inevitable early 2000s ‘celebrity apology’ and Letham’s own surreally off-kilter pop songs mixed in with familiar chart hits. The lighting design is extremely well thought-out and gives a cinematic quality to the live show.

The show concludes with what would be the ‘dark night of the soul’ – if Harmony Banks has a soul – as she breaks down into a final confession of emptiness.

The material is extremely well executed, but there is tension between the show’s two styles of physical and narrative theatre. The parodic videos, dramatic structure, and searching monologues set expectations that aren’t met. We don’t find out what caused her fall; and ultimately, the character is a bit of a straw woman. Are media stars really so empty of thoughts and opinions they can only exist through seeing themselves on screen? If Harmony is so empty, why should I care?

Harmony has great potential, and I hope she goes to a fancy wellness retreat to return as a slightly more rounded character.

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The Blurb:

From media darling to public downfall, this playful and poignant new show imagines the rise and fall of a fictional icon through a vibrant blend of dance-theatre and live documentary. Surreal, daring and sprinkled with bittersweet humour, it explores how women are shaped – and shattered – by the spotlight. Tess Letham brings this idiosyncratic character to life, offering a relatable glimpse into her humanity. Combining distinctive, improvisation-based movement with sharp cultural commentary, bizarre tenderness and unique physical presence, this is an innovative and thought-provoking work from one of Scotland's boldest dance-theatre voices.