The Untethered Joke
Image Credit: HUGO GLENDINNING
The Untethered Joke is emerging, a work-in-progress; the ideas are nascent, combustible, reckless, funny, violent, and the product of a new collaboration between Hannah Ringham and Sue MacLaine who will be onstage together and apart.
This is a dirty protest; demanding, cajoling and refusing. A performance that involves hurling autobiographical crumbs, declarations of love, elite conversation, jokes and poems from mountain tops of their own making.
The Untethered Joke is about loyalty, cruelty and endeavour and is performed by two fools taking on the world and each other.
The Untethered Joke is being created in collaboration with Hannah Ringham and began life at the Action Hero residency ‘You Can Be My Wingman’ undertaken in February 2020. Hannah and Sue maintained a creative relationship throughout the pandemic via zoom and in December 2020 successfully applied for Arts Council England project funding.
Hannah and Sue are working with Maiko Yamamoto from Theatre Replacement in Vancouver to create a manifesto that centres the artist within the creation and performance by detailing our philosophical, poetic and political approach to making and performing.
Maddy Costa, published in Exeunt: At the start of 2020 my relationship with theatre was heading for a breakdown, the argument between us getting messy. Theatre claiming to be honest, relevant, authentic; me wanting more truth, more adventure, more surprise. From that perspective if no other, lockdown came as a blessed relief: an opportunity to read of an evening, or watch a film for a change; to stop the frantic scrabble to keep up with the live performance treadmill; to let go the guilt of not seeing enough and disliking too much. As theatres have reopened I’ve changed, I’m seeing even less, but what I’m searching for remains constant: sensual delight, and an encounter with rigorous intelligence, the kind that’s like an oxygen pump to the brain. In The Untethered Joke, a work-in-progress at Camden People’s Theatre from Sue Maclaine and Hannah Ringham, I found both. Hannah swathed in red and orange tissue paper – portrait of a lady on fire – and Sue in a t-shirt belligerantly asking if you want to make something of it, and both of them diving deep into fears that come with ageing, violence against women, anger and vulnerability, with grace and humour and poetry. In the midst of winter doldrums, sharpened by pandemic, it gives me something to look forward to, knowing this show might return.
