Failure Project – Summerhall, Anatomy Lecture Theatre

A new play by BAFTA nominee Yolanda Mercy (Quarter Life Crisis), in which Mercy plays Ade Adeyami, a young British-Nigerian playwright and actor who is still riding the wave of her first play, which has become an unexpected Fringe hit.

With this success, and the realisation that she might even be able to make a living from her dream, comes an unexpected problem – a hierarchy of editors, agents and publicists who are there to help, nay manipulate, her.

Ade’s second play, Day Girl, about a working-class black kid at a private school, has been commissioned, and paid for, and Ade finds she must now dance to her new masters’ tune. Before she knows it a B-list, minor celebrity influencer with no acting experience is cast in the lead instead of Ade, worst still she want to be ‘collaborative’, the writing is on the wall. At the same time her theatre dream is taking a wrong turn, her personal life in the shape of an unsupportive family and an unfulfilling situationship begin to unravel.

Ade feels, just as her creativity is expanding, that her soul is being crushed and moulded by the white dominated industry that has shallowed her up. She want to write about lots of things but is time and again bullied into the Black and British and underprivileged category. Should she fight back against the machine or accept the status quo?

The real shame here is the performance space, The Anatomy Lecture Theatre at Summerhall, is sterile and tinny, with a pronounced echo. Fine for lectures perhaps, but not for performing sensitive works like this. In addition to the auditory problems, the form of the hall, with steeply raked seating bank up, in a constricting horseshoe, swallowing the performer is extremely exposing. I feel for the performer, I really do, like a body on a slab. It is to her extreme credit that Mercy performs as well as she does. As T.S Elliot once wrote, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall. Then how shall I begin?

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 8th August 2024

North West End UK Rating: