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| ID: Hannah Ward and Dylan Swain surrounded by the rest of the cast. Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
The fish is a metaphor, I am told. I had entered the Byre hoping to see its stage flooded and containing an at least somewhat large fish – a hope swiftly crushed. It turned out the fish is a catfish (as it was in the 2003 Tim Burton film – I do my research). Just as with catfishes online, you show up expecting a nice large slimy whiskery fish to cuddle and admire, and are met with an only slightly slimy, only slightly whiskery man.
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| ID: Callum Wardman-Browne and Dylan Swain. Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
This is Dylan Swain, playing chronic storyteller (liar) Edward; Callum Wardman-Browne plays his chronically boring son Will. That’s what the show’s about: ‘father to son’. It must have taken real effort to write a musical this aggressively heterosexual – isn’t it antithetical to the genre!? This musical dangerously works to reinforce a lot of normative practices within society that I think should be illegalised, such as heterosexual marriage, imagining things (I have aphantasia), straight people kissing each other (so horrifying I can’t even picture it), and men outside the home. In Big Fish, men are people, while women are wives or hapless lovers: men have the ability to take action and have adventures, with an endlessly-recurring motif of male conquest; women are their stationary admirers, at best using their womanly emotive powers to console and advise the (male, therefore emotionally stunted) men. No, it does not pass the Bechdel test. I’m pretty sure no women even speak to each other! And extra-no, there are no gays. Such is its overwhelming tide of heterosexuality, I couldn’t even think up any gay ships or gay jokes to write here.
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| ID: Dylan Swain, Lila Ahnger, and Callum Wardman-Browne. Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
However I enjoyed the show a lot! So let’s just pretend that this review meets the required queerness level to be on the Big Gay Blog. This enormous production of Big Fish (inconceivable numbers of cast and crew – more than I can count on my fingers), produced by Eilidh Read and directed by Emma Koonce, might just be the best musical I’ve seen here. It certainly sounded the nicest – and musicals can only sound nice if absolutely everyone does their job right. Enormous credit must go to Vocal Director Hannah Lam and Band Director Ben Williams, as well as to the cast and band themselves. My notes are filled with little exclamations of ‘sax!’ ‘glock!’ ‘guitar!’ which do no justice to the actual sound, and the consistent excellence, of the band all together. Enormous credit also goes to Sound Tech Iain Cunningham, spotted after the show leaning exhausted against the sound desk like he’d just reeled in an extraordinarily big and heavy fish, and the rest of the (enormous, variously-jobbed) tech team. The cast and band were mixed beautifully and sounded incredible; I found myself almost forgetting the existences of the microphones and the sound desk, and assuming the cast and orchestra were beamed uninterrupted directly into my ears.
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| ID: Callum Wardman-Browne and Dylan Swain surrounded by the Ensemble (posing dramatically). Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
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| ID: Ben Stockil and Dylan Swain. Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
The show itself is an investigation of Edward’s character and life story, mixing the ‘real’ world with his fantastical stories of himself. His story-world is the world of musical magic: Dylan switches effortlessly from old and doddering to young, swaggering, and energetic; Luke Lynch and Rory Innes’ lights move from plain reality to brightly colourful imagination and follow through every setting and mood change, recreating a circus tent and, with help from the ensemble, a tornado; sets, flys, and a truly breathtaking number of costumes (seemingly no character is permitted offstage without a costume change) come constantly in and out, an astonishing achievement from the stage management team; and lots of (small) fish are chucked onto the stage. There is always some joyful, self-consciously metatheatrical silliness happening. Ben Stockil’s Karl the Giant carries a chair around to stand on, Eddie Williams’ self-interested showman Amos howls primally, and when Ayla Jafri’s witch gets lifted the ensemble waggle the corners of her cloak mysteriously. The enormous cast floods the theatre with energy during all the large ensemble songs and dances (all the choreography is amazing and infectious – credit Calia Reilly), and are often striking brilliant dramatic poses, even to the point of distracting me from the king of self-conscious pose-striking, Dylan.
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| ID: Hanna Ward and Dylan Swain. Credit: Zachary Halna du Fretay. |
Edward acts the same in the real world, but there his magically inventive solutions don’t work, and just make him look cringe – Dylan's hapless cringeness at times chimes so deeply with my own insecurities that I have to stress-eat jelly babies to remain locked in. Edward can’t dance all fancy like Will, so he carries Will’s wife Josephine (Lila Ahnger, rather startled) around the stage instead. Despite being the main agent of Will's plot, Josephine is not important enough to get more than 10 seconds of singing, but she is important enough to suddenly become very visibly pregnant – unless it's a big fish she's hiding in there. All the joyful movement of the story-world disappears into stillness in reality. Callum’s Will is brusque and harsh, and guarded against everything to do with his father, but his singing captures vulnerability and emotional depth, and a persuasive character development. Dylan and Callum sing remarkably well, but Hanna Ward's unfalteringly brilliant performance as Edward’s infinitely loving wife Sandra eclipses them both and brings the audience to loud heaving overwrought sobs (even inducing a tear in your coldhearted and evil reviewer’s eye). If only she had an actually fleshed-out character! (and more songs please)
Once I get a sense of the offstage personalities of actors here in St Andrews, I’ve always found it difficult not to view all their parts as mere extensions of those personalities – but tonight I realised for the first time that I was repeatedly forgetting Dylan Swain was Dylan Swain, and Callum Wardman-Browne Callum Wardman-Browne. This shook me to my core (I’m choosing to blame it on sleep deprivation) – what on earth am I doing appreciating performances of straight male characters!? That’s the really sinister effect of this show. You get caught up in it and so so attached to the characters, and you begin to view the straights as people. Even though the family structures and ways of being they idealise are sickeningly patriarchal and sexist, you desperately sympathise with them anyway. Perhaps what Big Fish really goes to show is that, with the power of musical magic, and joy and whimsy and imagination, even the irredeemable subject of the Straight White Man can be rendered compelling, even heartrending. Get yourself a ticket!
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