Ever watched a play that you’re not entirely sure what’s going on for most of it, where the unexpected keeps on happening, where you’re laughing but you shouldn’t and where you come out thinking “Wow, that was good”? Well, that was Red Lola for me.
Asylum Theatre brought their show - a sold-out run at the Cork Midsummer Festival - to the Mill Street Studios for the past week and Saturday was the first chance we had to see it. I’m very glad we did.
While the blurb is just that bit extreme:
Red Lola just left grandma’s house and strayed right off the path. Red Lola’s not a little girl anymore. Red Lola lives in a land where pre-teenage girls wear Playboy tee-shirts, and every male is a potential predator, where premature sexuality and the fear of ‘stranger danger’ collide.
Red Lola is a surreal and darkly comic journey into the realm of the subconscious, fusing elements of puppetry, physical, and object theatre - part fairy tale, part morality play, Red Lola is a story of seduction, power, puberty, love, lust and lollipops.
The execution was really excellent and funny and where most of the laughs came from. The performers performed back-to-front - wearing masks on the back of their heads and facing the audience that way, so they had to do everything back to front, if you get me. The simple actions of waving, of sitting down, of opening an umbrella all assumed an extra dimension of difficulty and therefore humour. I’d say a number of people tried it afterwards.
It was an absolutely brilliant method which immediately grabbed the attention and tended to distract from some of the less “pleasant” aspects of the storyline.
The main characters Lola and Hum were played by Medb Lambert and Marcus Bale, who, despite the lack of dialogue brought an extraordinary amount of presence to the role. The Mill Street Studios were an ideal venue for the Olan Wrynn designed set - we watched most of the play as if we were watching a puppet-show or comic strip, each in short, snappy scenes telling the story of a schoolgirl and a married man at a bus stop and all the things that happen in between and as a result.
Full credit too to composer Linda Buckley whose soundtrack brought that added dimension of creepiness to the whole play. Lisa Zagone’s costumes really made the whole thing though with the final reveal being nearly as shocking as the ending.
If you ever get the chance to see it, do. Original, funny and just that bit different.
