Skye Loneragan

Kitchen Dancer

30/10/26

Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh

The Assembly Roxy’s Downstairs theatre has been reconfigured for tonight’s event. We arrive just ten minutes before curtain up but no one’s been admitted yet. We join the other audience members hanging around the bar area and try to avoid the urge to peep behind the black curtain that’s separating us from the stage.

Suddenly, writer-performer Skye Loneragan appears, dressed in gym leggings and clutching a yoga mat. She tells us to follow her and so we do – around the outside of the curtain into a temporary corridor. Here, she reveals that the mat is in fact a red carpet. “It’s for you,” she says, rolling it out. The word ‘gratitude’ is printed on it. She tells us all the things she’s grateful for.

And then the curtain is pulled aside, the red carpet moved (we don’t get to walk on it after all) and we’re led inside. The square-shaped performance space has a single row of seating around three of its sides, and a set comprising a cardboard concertina backdrop and a large rug with strange patterns cut out of it. I’m intrigued.

Directed by Stewart Ennis, the piece is part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, and its premise is quirky and engaging. The Olympic Games have added a new category, Coping Strategies, and SkyeC (an Australian) has been selected to represent Scotland. She’s a Registered Kitchen Dancer, who uses her untrained capers as a mechanism to help her deal with her problems. The trouble is, it doesn’t really seem to work… Like Shirley Valentine before her, SkyeC is reduced to talking to inanimate objects, although things have moved on since the 1980s, and – unlike Shirley’s wall – SkyeC’s Roomba can actually reply.

SkyeC has a lot to contend with. Her tiny, cramped flat is full to bursting. Her husband is working from home and must not be disturbed. Her mother is in another room, making querulous demands. There’s a daughter, who’ll need picking up from school shortly, and someone else (another relative?), who’s been sectioned and phones to plead with Skye to get them out. As if that weren’t already too much, there’s a film crew too, here to record Skye’s Kitchen Dancing routine.

She’s just hoping they don’t know about the online furore that’s led to her being cancelled…

There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but many of them feel under-explored. It’s all very scattershot and I can’t help feeling a more traditional story arc would improve things enormously, allowing the tension to build and the revelation about SkyeC’s cancellation to serve as a pay-off.

Apart from the narrow corridor to the mother’s room, I don’t really get a sense of the cramped space SkyeC performs in. She tells us about low ceilings and crawl spaces, but doesn’t realise them physically. In addition, the film crew seem to appear and disappear, so that I’m never fully convinced they’re actually there.

All in all, Kitchen Dancer has the kernel of a good idea but – in its current guise – it’s under-developed. I’d love to see a version of this where I feel fully immersed in SkyeC’s world and can really empathise with her situation.

3 stars

Susan Singfield

Though This Be Madness

22/05/22

The Studio, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Though This Be Madness deals with both the micro and the macrocosm: a study of one woman’s mental health, and a record of her place in a long line of other women. She is daughter, sister, mother. She is Shakespeare’s heroines.

This is Skye Loneragan’s scattershot depiction of a new mother, struggling to finish a sentence without being interrupted by a baby’s cry, and it’s a haphazard, palpably stressful piece. ‘The Land of the Lounge Room’ is messy, with toys strewn everywhere, and our protagonist has given up trying to tidy them away. There’s no point, is there? Her body’s been ravaged; she doesn’t remember what sleep feels like; her doctor’s unsympathetic and her mother thinks she shares too much. Oh, and her sister’s schizophrenic.

There’s a lot to process here. The fragmented, unstructured narrative works well to convey a sense of disconnection and distraction, but it also means that not everything lands, and that some interesting ideas are lost in the chaos. The references to Shakespeare’s women, in particular, feel under-explored.

Loneragan is an engaging performer (with exemplary mime skills). I like the symbolism of the post-it notes and the overt circularity of the piece, and Mairi Campbell’s music lends it an eerie – almost hypnotic – air. In the end, however, I can’t help feeling this piece is both too much and too little: too many ideas for the short running time, and too little made of the best of them.

3 stars

Susan Singfield