Review: Manic Street Creature, Kiln Theatre

Manic Street Creature by Maimuna Memon is a wonderfully adventurous piece of gig theatre that challenges and reshapes theatrical genres to create something musically and conceptually fresh.

Memon herself stars as Ria, a singer songwriter who has moved down from the north west to try to forge a career in London. The show is effectively a live gig in which Memon performs nine songs with her band, but rather than staging the evening as a concert it is framed as a recording session for an album.

Between songs, Ria narrates her arrival in London: searching for places to perform and eventually meeting her boyfriend Dan. The narrative soon darkens as the story explores Dan’s increasingly difficult struggle with bipolar disorder and Ria’s attempts to navigate life alongside him, with a crucial twist in the tail.

Memon’s musical talent is immense. Her voice is a kaleidoscope of colour that can soar effortlessly one moment and create extraordinary intimacy the next. Traditional song structures are often set aside in favour of winding musical forms that mirror the emotional currents of the story. It is ambitious writing that demands the audience’s full attention throughout.

The musical execution is equally impressive. Before the show began there were at least seven guitars visible on stage, hinting at the scale of the musical palette. The band members Heidi (Rachel Barnes), Finn (Sam Beveridge) and Raz (Harley Johnstone) move fluidly between drums, guitar, cello and keyboards. There is an easy synergy between performers and score that makes the music feel as though it is breathing through them. Combined with flawless sound design and the Kiln Theatre’s excellent acoustic, the result is musically breathtaking.

The show began life at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it won awards, and it has clearly grown in scale through successive productions. Yet this expansion may also be where some difficulties emerge.

At its core the piece explores poor mental health, trauma and the impact these experiences have on those who live alongside them. Early moments of humour, drawn from a slightly naive ‘Northerner arrives in London’ perspective, are brief. What follows is an unrelentingly dark narrative.

Having not seen earlier versions, it is impossible to know exactly how the piece previously functioned, but there is a sense that such intimate material sits slightly uneasily within the scale of this larger production. Personal experiences that might feel confessional or relatable in a smaller setting sometimes feel indulgent or over-amplified when presented with the scale and polish of a production that would not look out of place on a West End stage. The emotional intensity rarely lets up and, at more than ninety minutes without interval, that becomes demanding. This is especially true when you consider that Memon carries all the dramatic work on her shoulders – the other musicians may have character names, but that’s as far as it goes. Even in any dialogue with boyfriend Dan, she performs both roles. This feels unnecessarily restrictive given the scale of the rest of the production.

The best metaphor may be architectural. The show now resembles an impressive palace: expansive, polished and full of talent. Yet it still rests on theatrically modest foundations in terms of script, narrative and characterisation: foundations that do not always support the scale of the structure built upon them.

There is no doubt that Memon is an artist of formidable ability and imagination. It seems inevitable that we will hear much more from her. The most exciting next step, however, might not be continuing to upscale this piece, but creating something entirely new.

Written by Maimuna Memon
Directed by Kirsty Patrick Ward
Designed by Libby Watson
Lighting designed by Jessica Hung Han Yun
Sound design by Rob Bettle and Sam Clarkson for Sound Quiet Time
Movement direction by Anjali Mehra

Manic Street Creature plays at The Kiln Theatre until Saturday 28 March.