Jade Blue - Against the Odds

WINNER: OUTSTANDING DIRECTION AWARD,
ATLANTIC FRINGE FESTIVAL (CANADA)
www.thecoast.ca

A perfect mixture of abstract ideas and human drama...
A brave and distinctive piece of work.
www.BritishTheatreGuide.com

Beguiling... powerful... rewarding!
www.FringeReview.co.uk

A tour-de-force of acting and narrative ideas...
a bravura performance... ultimately very moving.
www.ThreeWeeks.co.uk

A stunning piece of theatre, which provokes
without undermining the audience's perceptions...
well worth seeing!
www.WhatsOnStage.com

A great introduction to a new talent...
left everyone talking as they left the theatre.
www.theargus.co.uk

Not only a beautiful piece of Fringe theatre,
but it is the type of show that would nourish and
enrapture audiences of the professional theatre
across this country as well.
www.twisitheatreblog.com (Canada)

Against the Odds is beautifully wrought story of family, loyalty and mental illness. Actor Jade Blue portrays Flora, a mathematical savant who has spent several years in a mental institution. She also portrays the most important people in Flora’s life—-her beloved father and his bon vivant friend Jack, her selfish mother, her contemptible grandfather and her kind aunt. Blue is a pleasure to watch and does a remarkable job of differentiating each character in voice and physicality. The play explores the roles of chance and choice in a unique and interesting way, leading to a heartbreaking conclusion.

Jade Blue’s one-woman show is a perfect mixture of abstract ideas and human drama. It’s a finely restrained story about a mentally disturbed young woman who’s also a mathematical genius; sectioned in a mental health unit, she tells us the stories of the various people in her life. Flora is not quite an unreliable narrator in the style of the autistic central character in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time but there are gaps in her knowledge, certainly, and Blue’s performance capitalises on this to portray Flora’s heartbreaking naivete. In particular, Flora has no sense of restraint in terms of what items from her huge mental store of information she thinks it is okay to share with the world. So she tells us, matter-of-factly and even enthusiastically, about suicides, how you can tell which people are most serious about ending themselves from whether they’ve thrown themselves under the train as it was pulling in or pulling away; and how you can tell when someone has jumped off Beachy Head and then changed their mind on the way down, because their hands are raw from scrabbling at the cliff-face.

It could be depressing and morbid, but in fact the show is ultimately quite uplifting. Flora herself is not disturbed by what she’s talking about, only objectively interested. The point that the play is going for – which is underlined by mathematics featuring so strongly, if you subscribe to chaos theory and the like – is that existence is precarious. Flora phrases this more inspiringly when she talks about the massive statistical unlikeliness of each of us being alive and being the people we are – “we are all here against the odds”.

The theme of randomness extends to the format of the show, in which Jade-as-Flora introduces the four people who matter the most to her, and then deals out playing cards and asks an audience member to shout stop at a random point – whichever suit that card is corresponds to one of the four people, and means she will tell their story next. Blue brilliantly inhabits the characters of Flora’s heartless mother, her large, cheerful aunt, her snooty Grandad (her mother’s father), and her dad’s friend. The only character missing is Flora’s dad himself: he’s been away for the last few years, for a terrible reason, we discover. He’s a writer; Flora theorises, “we tell stories to control what happens”, and there’s a sense that she’s telling stories to control what is happening to her.

With typical clear-sightedness she dissects the flawed nature of mental health treatment: “You stop being yourself in hospital. You become what’s wrong with you. They could put any normal person in hospital and then find a reason to keep them there forever.” Flora has told herself, over and over, the story of what will happen when her dad returns to her; and the climax of the play sees her finally confront the truth. Blue begins the play with a series of silent poses, lights illuminating each one briefly, and cleverly returns to these positions at the end, when we realise their significance – the progress of Flora’s mental state as the news dawns on her. To a mind that needs order and control, the cruelly unpredictable nature of the world is an unbearable thing. All this, Blue communicates clearly and succintly. A brave and distinctive piece of work.

This absorbing one-woman show is a tour-de-force of acting and narrative ideas. Revolving around Flora, a young mathematical genius trying to come to terms with the world she lives in, 'Against The Odds' is partly interactive: through a device where audience members select cards from a deck, spectators influence how the play unravels. But the show should be seen for the achievement of actress Jade Blue (also one of the co-writers), who inhabits six different roles in a bravura performance full of great individual characterisations and subtle nuances. Much of the effect was derived from the tenderness in her acting, making even the toughest of characters somehow sympathetic, and others were played with such fragility that was ultimately very moving.

Jade Blue’s one-woman show is a beguiling piece that examines how the choices we make determines the path of our lives but how chance can have a much greater bearing in the way that it often determines the choices available to you in the first place.

Flora is a mathematical prodigy with an uncanny ability to reduce the world to a numbers, probabilities and logical choices. But Flora is also a disturbed young woman, desperately trying to come to terms with the world she lives in.

She’s expecting a visit from her story-writer father, Harry, for the first time in over two years. Harry is a very ordinary man faced with making a very extraordinary decision – does he do the right thing or the thing that is best for everyone. And as she prepares for the visit, Flora takes us back through her brief life and introduces you to the people whose choices contributed to her being where she is right now.

This was a piece where logic and emotion come together and it’s a powerful combination, forcing Harry to face a decision that many would be unable to resolve, in this case whether he loves someone enough to leave them forever. And in an interesting twist, this pivotal question was left hanging in the air. Too many writers want everything buttoned down at the end of a play, but Jade Blue and her co-writer (and director) George Dillon had the courage to leave not only this but several other key issues dangling unresolved in front of the audience.

Yet for all these potent juxtapositions of logic and emotion it was a charming, witty and times quite moving piece of theatre. Jade Blue forms her characters with great care, each being different physically as well as in voice, accent and delivery. There was genuine variety as well, from the hard indifference of Flora’s mother to the paternalism of the grandfather to the touching fragility of Flora and Harry themselves. Her use of the limited space on stage was also creative – each corner was assigned to one of the peripheral people in the story leaving Flora and Harry the central limelight. And some creative lighting and haunting sound augmented the words appropriately.

However, sometimes less is more. The piece reached what felt like a natural conclusion but the spell was rather broken by a reprise of a poem that Flora had recited earlier. That’s a minor point though in what is a production with a lot to recommend it. Against the Odds is a tale where you have to think as you listen and watch – a piece that the watcher must invest in, if you will. So it’s not the easiest hour you will spend in a theatre but it’s a rewarding experience if you’re prepared to make the effort.

Jade Blue takes centre stage in this piece, inspired by a scene in a Paul Auster novel, and developed by her and director George Dillon.

The basic plot revolves around a young girl, Flora, who is waiting for her father to visit. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that the eighteen year old is currently in a mental hospital, and has been for some years. She is naturally brilliant but obsessive about numbers, facts and dice. Her father has been in prison for fraud but today is the day of his release.

The show jumps between Flora spouting facts and figures directly to the audience and her portrayal of the five major characters involved in her life: her father, an ordinary man who loves his daughter; her mother, the selfish daughter of a rich man; her grandfather who states he wants what's best for Flora but only serves his own purpose; her aunt, who at least is more affectionate then her own mother and Jack, her father's best friend.

Blue assumes the role of each character in turn as she reveals more about her life. She moves between characters with a smooth efficiency: each role has its own specific physical characteristics and manner of speech. After each character's monologue she then reverts to the more upright Flora. So much of what the protagonist says depends on the roll of her dice and what she perceives as the meaning of the two numbers she sees.

She makes the audience uncertain as to whether they are actually influencing events in the play. It is impossible to see if she really is rolling the numbers she says she is. She also deals out cards which represent the different people in her life and then asks the audience to decide where she stops, then tells the story of that person's visit to her earlier that day.

In the end, it is time for her father to visit, but he comes with a terrible decision to make. Should he renew his relationship with his beloved daughter; or should he bow to the machinations of his ex-father-in-law and walk out of her life forever, but with the knowledge that her care in the hospital will be paid for by her grandfather for a long as necessary?

Dillon and Blue have created a stunning piece of theatre, which provokes without undermining the audience's perceptions. It is well worth seeing if it returns to the north west again.

Given the countless trillions of random ways our chromosomes might have aligned, every single one of us exists against the odds. But for some of us, Fate deals a harsher card; for some of us, the odds against success on this planet are longer still. These are the themes of actor-writer Jade Blue’s challenging one-woman play, which burns slowly but, ultimately, brightly – and builds through joy and grief towards an all-but-unbearable end.

You can tell this is going to be a different type of show as soon as the lights go up, revealing a striking tableau of a woman clutching a briefcase – not unhappy, but insecure and alone. With a precision that hints at something not quite normal, central character Flora fills the four corners of the stage with four very different objects. They represent the four men and women who dominate her life, and who all have visited her today. And as she moves from corner to corner, Blue steps into these roles in turn – slowly revealing Flora’s sad story and pointing the way to the crisis which comes only at the very end.

A few of the characters weren’t all that successfully evoked – the gambling granddad, in particular, seemed a stereotyped shell – but the ones which really mattered, she nailed. In an especially memorable scene, lying on the floor, she switches between two figures simply by changing the position of her legs; it feels like it shouldn’t work, but it triumphantly does. And Flora, of course, is at the heart of it all; she’s an adult now, but she’s still the lost little girl we saw on her first day at school. Or was it school? No… no. It was somewhere else.

Continuing the theme of luck, Jade Blue plays the croupier; the order she presents the characters’ vignettes is set by the suits of cards she deals from a deck. Since each scene reveals something significant about the people in Flora’s life, I accept that seeing them in a different order would change the colour of the play. But, of course, there’s no way to tell for sure; even if I watched the whole thing again, I’d have to find a way to wipe my memory before I could experience it anew. The gambit’s discreet enough that it doesn’t get in the way of the story but it is, I fear, one of those conceits which resonates less with the audience than it does with the players themselves.

In one respect, though, the card trick works. There’s one symbolic card that’s never turned up, but is always on display; it’s the joker, Flora’s much-loved but long-absent dad. It’s not through choice, we learn – and when he at last returns, the hand he’s dealt contains an unbearably poignant dilemma. As a plot development it’s a little contrived, but it’s still the perfect conclusion; proof that sometimes in this world, all choices are the wrong one.

Jade Blue gives a beautifully measured portrayal of a girl with mental illness who sees everything in terms of numbers and probability in this one-woman play.

This is an interactive performance: the actress throws a die or asks the audience to pick a card to determine which of the characters in Flora's life she is going to show us next.

We meet Flora's brilliant but flawed writer father, her unsympathetic mother, her rich grandfather and her loving aunt.

George Dillon's direction is extraordinarily precise and Blue's concentration and control is superb. But while the technique is near flawless the story gets a little lost in all the elegant abstractions of the script.

There are some beautifully written philosophical passages about the nature of chance, but like Flora herself, the writing is a little emotionally detached.

Choice and chance – the two factors that determine the courses of our lives – were at the centre of this debut one-woman show . Jade Blue played Flora, a young woman waiting eagerly for her father’s first visit in two years, but with a definite feeling that something important was about to happen to her.

Chance was integral to the structure of the show. Flora rolled dice to determine which major plot points to drip-feed into the story and asked the audience to cut giant playing cards to decide on the order we met the five most important people in her life.

As a performer Jade captured all five of her main characters brilliantly, using minimal props and exaggerated movements to give an essence of their character.

Particularly impressive was a board game between Flora and her father, with the simple device of how she lay on her front defining who we were looking at.

The physical movements and music used to underline Flora’s own internal conflicts did feel a little intrusive though, and detracted from what was actually being said.

But it was a great introduction to a new local talent, with a cliffhanger ending based on a difficult decision that left everyone talking as they left the theatre.

Against the Odds is not only a beautiful piece of Fringe theatre, but it is the type of show that would nourish and enrapture audiences of the professional theatre across this country as well. Performed by Jade Blue, Against the Odds is co-written and directed by Edinburgh Fringe veteran George Dillon and it only has one more performance at Neptune’s Studio Theatre as part of the Atlantic Fringe Festival, so I strongly recommend that you get your tickets in advance and sell this one out.

This play tells the story of Flora, a young math prodigy with an undisclosed mental condition. She lives in a hospital and is waiting for her father, who she hasn’t seen in two and a half years. She spends the ensuing 52 minutes telling us about the four people in her life that she cares most about, amid musings and tangents about probability and numbers which shape her deeply perceptive and unique understanding of the world.

Jade Blue takes us vividly into Flora’s fascinating mind. We suddenly find ourselves in a world where numbers reign supreme and much is left up to power of chance. A lot of what Flora tells us is prompted by the numbers that she rolls with two dice. For Flora, numbers produce both memories and remembered facts, both of which seem to be held very close to her heart. Her candid detachment to the things that she relates is very striking and I think manipulates the way that the audience receives the information. She tells us we can tell how serious people are about their suicide plans by the location they choose on a railway and relates a horrific tale of abuse from her family history, in a startling matter-of-fact manner, but also with a sense of joy and triumph at the knowledge. She is fascinated by the human condition, but analytically, and through Flora, that interest transcends very easily into the audience.

Flora is also enchanted with the idea of storytelling because her father is a writer, and she has learned that the storyteller is able to control the way the story and its meaning is constructed in the ordering of the events. Order and control are obviously very important to Flora, which makes it that much more devastating to watch the world happen to her. Yet, she also puts her faith in the universe, allowing the audience to choose, via a deck of cards, the order in which she will tell us about the people she cares about.

Blue inhabits these four characters skilfully: Flora’s distant socialite mother, her rich Granddad, her father’s best friend and her fat aunt who dances and eats. Although each of these characters inhabits a sort of extreme, none of them are caricatures, and Blue portrays them with the same subtly and specificity that she gives to Flora. She is particularly gifted at bringing Flora’s mother, Charlotte, to life, and the relationship she creates between these two characters is so rich it’s a marvel that such dynamics can be woven by a single actor.

George Dillon ensures that Flora’s attention to order and detail dictate the strong organization of her story, placing each character represented in his or her own distinct space and repeating actions, like the rolling of the dice, with an eagerness that borders on compulsive. Much of Flora’s fragility that makes her such an endearing, but also tragic character is portrayed through movement and facial expressions, especially her grandiose gestures and unabashed, vulnerable grin. Along with the thoughtful use of lighting, the direction, the performance and the script all come together and hurdles toward a very poignant conclusion.

It is clear that we are fortunate to have Jade Blue in our midst. I strongly urge you to head down to Neptune’s Studio Theatre (1593 Argyle Street) and to attend her final performance.

This review first appeared at:
http://www.twisitheatreblog.com/archives/998

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