Blackbird (Not Part Of – Manchester)

Venue: Studio
Where: Salford

Southern belle Blackbird (sole performer and author Lucia Cox) awaits the arrival of her beau Charlie. To allay her anxiety at his lateness she tells us of how he saved her from drowning and we become aware of potentially unpleasant reasons for contradictions in her story and gaps in her memory.
 
Blackbird is a creepy play inspired by a real life case of a woman held for years in sexual slavery in the deep south of the USA. Yet the play disturbs as it allows insight into a truly troubled mind rather than because of the subject matter.
 
Cox enacts the parts of both captive and captor – with a consistently convincing southern accent. Charlie is a deluded redneck who has constructed a fictitious life based upon films like Night of the Hunter and Jaws. The former is marvellously re-created onstage with only a trunk for props.
 
Blackbird herself is even more worrying. Cox’s ambiguous performance gives rise to the possibility that her relationship with Charlie is not compelled but mutual. It is a subtle but very unsettling development. The atmosphere of the play reflects this ambiguity with deep shadows covering parts of the stage and insights being shown with bright bursts of light.
 
The brevity of the play (well under an hour) prevents it from offering a full evening’s entertainment but if it could be matched with another short play of equal power that would be a hell of a double-bill.
 
– Dave Cunningham