Review - All This Living

All This Living

Written and performed by Camilla Blunden

Director – Rochelle Whyte

Sound Designer – Kimmo Vennonen

Lighting Design – Gillian Schwab

Dramaturg – Peter Matheson

Stage Manager/Operator – Lea Collins

All this Living is a complex rich work that touches on the difficult subject of aging.  It is particularly relevant to the older woman.  Full marks to Camilla Blunden for engaging with focus groups of older women to bring their experience and voices out into the light through this very personal medium of a one-woman performance.  All this Living is a fabulous vehicle to open up the subject area and broaden awareness with divergent audiences.  It is nothing if not worthy. 

Ms. Blunden is an excellent performer she is attractive, clear and engaging and thoroughly committed to her very pertinent well written material.  Her incorporation of Myth and Legend weaves in a deeper and richer more universal relevance to the personal. 

The Butterfly Club, as fantastic atmospheric venue, doesn’t seem to be the right fit for this work or Ms. Blunden’s target audience.  A torn red velvet curtain is a very limited backdrop – literally. 

It feels like a ‘work in progress’ that would generate better understandings and broaden perspectives on female aging through audience discussion and questions.  It does not feel like a finished polished piece of Theatre that fully serves the material or indeed Ms. Blunden.

The use of voice over is a clever device and mostly successful, I would imagine in particularly keeping the work on track.  But it got me wondering how the material would develop and grow through the incorporation of another performer.

The staging could be much more supportive of the performer.   A stage scattered with saucepans, calico cloths, a pen and notepad just looks cluttered and messy and at times renders movement ungainly.  As for the Kangaroo suit costume its intended semiotic meaning completely evaded me.   However this could be my fault as I arrived slightly late.   

I imagine All this Living works as a touring piece for Health and Community Centres and possibly even Schools.  But it would pack a much stronger and worthwhile punch if it was refreshed and renewed with crisp, clear and defined direction and a more consolidated design.  

It is a bit like an old still very serviceable couch that urgently needs to be overhauled and re-upholstered.  It would be wonderful if the whole creative team could get back together to remake the somewhat battered staging.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)