Baby Baby – Herald Review
The word “pramface” was coined to further demonise working class single mothers from Shameless-style council estates. Vivian French’s play, adapted from her own novel for young people, redresses the balance somewhat by giving voice to a pair of what used to be known as gym-slip mums and empowering them beyond the usual stereotypes.
Under ordinary circumstances, goth girl Pinkie and street-smart April wouldn’t be seen dead together. Each runs with their own pack, resentfully aware of each other. When first time sex makes them both pregnant, they eventually find some kind of common ground when invited to share their experiences with the local posh school, moving beyond tribal divides to do their growing up in public.
Old-time social realism would have treated such material in a well-meaning but laboured kitchen-sink fashion, with at least one back street abortion thrown in for good measure.
What French and director Jemima Levick have opted for instead is to dove-tail each young woman’s first-person narrative across each other in an impressionistic, representational playing style that pulls no punches and never falls prey to easy sentimentalism.
The result is something akin to Nell Dunn’s Poor Cow dragged kicking and screaming into the here and now for the Skins generation.
Hannah Donaldson and Ashley Smith make for a feisty pair,
telling it like it is and never shirking from the ugly truth of things as they parade their way around Lisa Sangster’s black chrome set.
As April and Pinkie realise how their lives are mirrored, this moving and all too real story becomes a getting of wisdom en route to empowerment.
Baby Baby – Whats on Stage Review
The plot is centered round Pinkie and April, who have different friends, fashion, tastes and attitudes. Pinky with her bright pink punk hair, hippy charity shop clothes and biker boots lives in another world from April, with her nice tops, skinny jeans and snow white trainers. They are as different as girls can be. Being fifteen is the only thing they share until contrasting events give them another thing in common – they both become pregnant, and their two worlds collide at Tinley Road School for young mums.
A two-hander play, Hannah Donaldson (April) and Ashley Smith (Pinkie) give spirited and confident performances of their central roles as well as effortlessly switching on cue to play a variety of the play’s other characters including April and Pinkie’s mothers, which gives an informative insight into their own mother/daughter relationships.
Smith pitches her performance of street-wise and self-assured Pinkie at just the right level – conveying her character’s cockiness and abruptness without alienating her audience.
She moves effortlessly from joy and independency to anger, realization and eventual maturity. Donaldson on the other hand has a very different job on her hands as nice girl April who loses her virginity in completely different circumstances. Both actresses display their comic and dramatic abilities with extreme style and manage to embrace the audience beautifully with immaculate and well-paced delivery.
The production is directed by Jemima Levick who keeps both girls very much on their toes in a perfectly paced production on a simple set designed by Lisa Sangster, with limited props including two add-on costume bumps which effectively symbolize the girls pregnancies and eventual births.
A thought-provoking and moving play about prejudices, perceptions and parenting and how these attitudes impact our choices in life, Baby Baby is a well written, directed and acted piece of theatre which certainly seemed to be well received by its primarily young opening night audience, giving everyone something to think about on the way home.
Baby Baby Flyer
Ashley is currently appearing in Baby Baby in association with Shetland Arts.
Check out the flyer and get more information by clicking the title above.
For more information check out these links
Stellar Quines Theatre Company
Nasty, Brutish and Short – Joyce McMillan Review
Nasty, Brutish and Short. Set by Wilkinson and Hill in some dystopian dump where the characters live with their feet in two inches of cold water… this is a nightmare hate-triangle of a play, in which a violent and bullying older brother, Jim, wades brutally into the fragile relationship between younger brother Luke – just out of mental hospital – and his new girlfriend Mary Jane, a helpless and childlike teenage mother.
The play has a certain primal power, particularly towards the end; and
Ashley Smith gives a harrowing performance as the battered Mary Jane.
In a culture saturated with sadistic porn, though, there’s something chillingly voyeuristic about the way this play forces the audience to watch the relentless bullying and eventual rape of Mary Jane; and something reactionary about the way it distances that violence from the audience by adopting such a familiar caricature of a working-class Glasgow voice.
Nasty, Brutish and Short
Completed Runs:
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
06/11/2008 - 15/11/2008
Andy Duffy’s Nasty, Brutish and Short finds two brothers, Jim and Luke, holed up in a Glasgow flat. No job, no money and it looks like the only things on offer are all bad. As the options start to run out, Jim takes what isn’t his and sets the two brothers on a collision course . . .
Think about it.
Forget the money.
Picture yourself there.
The adrenaline.
The fear.
365 – Broadway World Review
The play’s characters are brought to life by a young but incredibly accomplished cast of actors, each one of whom delivers a knock-out performance. The quality of the acting is so strong that it is hard to single out individuals but particularly impressive are Ben Presley (who brings both humour and pathos to the character of the not-too-bright boy whose only possession of value is his toaster);
Ashley Smith (who gives a heartbreaking performance as a girl struggling to cope with the knowledge that she was neglected and abandoned as a young child by her mother);
Gayle Telfer Stevens (who gives a highly sympathetic performance as the social worker fighting against the odds to care for the teenagers under her supervision while balancing her capacity for caring against her need to distance herself emotionally); and Owen Whitelaw (who gives perhaps the most eye-catching and powerful performance of all as the “damaged” boy whose own emotional scars have made him malevolent and violent but who is still a frightened little boy inside).
365 – List Feature
The official line is that the actors playing the teenagers leaving residential care homes, whose interlinked lives make up the meat of 365 are ‘mostly aged between 16 and 24’, but well over half of them have already graduated. I sit down with Helen Mallon, best known for her work in NTS flagship show The Wolves in the Walls, fiercely intelligent newcomer Simone James, brought up from London for this production, and
Ashley Smith, whose expressionless, lovely features are currently slapped all over the publicity for the show.
Possibly because I’ve half-convinced myself they’re all teenagers, I’m initially surprised at their articulacy and the depth of their knowledge. But then, they’ve been hired for it.
365 – National Theatre Scotland
Ashley Smith will be performing with the National Theatre Scotland in the play 365.
Edinburgh Festival
Wed 13th, Friday 15th, Saturday 16th – Playhouse Theatre at 8pm.
London
Sat 13 – 2.30pm, Wed 17 – 1.30pm, Sat 20 – 2.30pm, Wed 24 – 1.30pm, Sat 27 – 2.30pm – Lyric Hammersmith, times vary.
J is 16. She has so much to hope for. Tonight is the first night of the rest of her life – her first night in her own place. She is finally free of the faceless and noisy world of corporate parenting that has made up her short life. And here, in this flat, she can learn the skills needed to become an adult – budgeting, shopping, cooking, cleaning…
But J won’t use her full name. She won’t look at a clock or wear a watch and has no understanding of time. She has no idea what her story is, what her truth is. She is a jumbled mixture of melted memories and until she can make some sense of it, J hasn’t really got a chance. Tonight, in the silence, she must begin to learn a lifetime.
J is one of fourteen young people we meet, who every day and night of every year, piece together fragments of their past to create a future. 365 is the story of trying to understand your own story. Of trying to become an adult.
There are currently over 70,000 children in care in the UK and, on average, they pass through eleven stages of being “looked after” by the state. 365 is a crucial new piece of work from the National Theatre of Scotland that lays bare the ordeals of just some of these young people, who with their humour, imagination and raw courage take their first faltering steps towards adulthood.
Set in the transitory and surreal world of a practice flat – one of society’s mechanisms to gently introduce young people in care to the outside world – 365 is a powerfully visual piece of theatre created by the National Theatre of Scotland’s Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone with text by David Harrower, one of our generation’s leading playwrights. Also featuring a specially composed song by Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile and choreography by Frantic Assembly’s Steven Hoggett (Black Watch).
If you are interested in seeing her at either of these events, please contact AshleyJadeSmith@googlemail.com
Liar – List Review
Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 7 Jun, then touring
CHILDREN’S THEATRE
Scottish travelling songs and family secrets are revealed together in Davey Anderson’s play for young adults, which explores the difficulties people have when they are required to tell the truth. On their first day of summer holidays, ten-year-olds Lizzie and Stevie spy a silver-haired old woman with a caravan across the canal. The woman’s unlikely appearance sparks Lizzie’s curiosity, which intensifies when her mother Sheila tells her not to go near the woman. Lizzie tells her first lie when she crosses the canal at the sound of Jeanie’s singing. Other lies are told in succession as a relationship between Lizzie and Jeanie develops, and an old truth is eventually uncovered.
Narrated at an energetic pace, Liar focuses on the historical tensions between travellers and settled people. With such serious issues, Anderson chooses to challenge rather than merely amuse his young audience. The full Scottish cast is accompanied by an a cappella trio who break into bits of song whenever the tension rises. Anderson skillfully matches the tenor of the music to the intensity of the dialogue. Images of canals, campfires and beaches are also expertly conjured on the blank stage.
As Lizzie, Ashley Smith gives a buoyant and sincere performance,
whereas Jim Sturgeon as both Stevie and Lizzie’s dad provides the play’s much needed comic relief. The audience remains captivated by the actors’ constant rotation around the blank stage, as if to show all sides of the story. Rarely has a play about dishonesty been so truthful about human behaviour.
Spanglebaby – View From The Stalls Review
Because after this the “Better Life” concept largely disappears and we focus on the relationship between boss Richard (Brian Ferguson) and his P.A. “Amy Rose” (Ashley Smith) and from here on the business they are in is largely irrelevant – they could be selling socks and the story would still work. What we’re presented with is a bit of an “Ugly Betty” situation – competent but quirkily dressed Personal Assistant working for a demanding boss. This is where the show comes into its own and we see Richard crumble under pressure from above and take out his frustrations on Amy Rose. Their final confrontation really gives Ferguson and Smith a chance to show off their skills.