Theatre / Reviews
Review: HUG, Tobacco Factory Theatres
Like her previous pieces Mmm Hmmm and Symphony, Verity Standen’s HUG devotes itself to exploring the various, and variously uplifting, effects of the human voice in a live performance.
This time around, the audience is led into the space and invited to sit down at any of the chairs sprinkled around the room and to put on the eyemask hanging over the seatback. Audiences remain blindfolded for the show’s 25-minute duration, greatly heightening the aural and tactile qualities of what follows.
Briefly, and not to give away too much for any would-be audiences (two words there: do it), Standen and accompanying choir sing a hypnotic, building terrace of words, moving and modulating through different keys, ebbing and flowing in volume and emotion from hushed to passionate, and moving around the room so, in your blindfolded state, the sound seems to drip from the ceiling, bounce off the walls, burrow into your inner ear and every other possible, delightfully discombobulating aural permutation.
At the same time each audience member is also treated, individually, to a subtly changing embrace from one of the singers – intimate in its one-to-one nature, but not something anyone bar the chronically squeamish should fear. The conjunction of this warm embrace and the ebbing, swirling sounds all around – at their strongest directly in your ear, of course, forming an aural hug equivalent to the physical one – has a deeply affirmative, loving, hypnotic quality.
A beautiful, slowly enveloping marriage of sound and sensation, and an affimative treat for both ears and nerve endings. No change here in our ongoing recommendation to experience everything Verity Standen does.
HUG continues at Tobacco Factory Theatres until Thursday, July 21 but is now entirely sold out. For more from Verity Standen, visit veritystanden.com
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