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Theatre Review: There's No Point Crying Over Spilt Milk ***

Lorna Irvine reviews a 'small but poignant show'.

Memories are peculiar—they often sneak in unannounced and uninvited, mutating into different shapes and textures. We all, to some extent, re-write our histories, holding onto the good bits, filtering out the painful or unpleasant. Aby Watson's small but poignant show acts like a virtual photograph album (pre-Instagram, when people actually held tangible keepsakes in their hands).

Performing in black, Watson, an impish, endearing presence, is accompanied by gangly, often deadpan musician Alex Horowitz on piano and electric guitar. Theirs is a seemingly conspiratorial partnership, with timing built on trust. There are four pints of water on top of the piano, which they swig from throughout—perhaps representing four losses?

Through the children's song Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,Watson attempts to climb back into the frame of her four-year-old self—where, terrified, she once ran away from a ballet performance- so she can make it all okay now. Yet she knows that is not always how it works. Life isn't that simple.

Through various iterations of the song—shrill, jazzy, hilarious power ballad complete with 'Hello, Glasgow!' shouted out to the small space, a spot-on Liam Gallagher and punky scream (a bit too controlled for my liking- I really wanted her to let go even more)—various ages of her life are revisited. But it is the contemplative spaces in-between, like a minute's silence for the dead, that are most telling, changing the tone almost imperceptibly at first. Happy memories of loud singing, sitcoms with her Dad and bacon butties are sharply contrasted with losing a loved one to cancer, loneliness and sorrow.

A jaunty audience singalong of Heads... is thus re-written as an elegy to the lost. Notes in the melody ebb away until, they too, are lost. Very affectingly, Watson is left alone on the stage, softly singing a cappella, slapping her thigh for percussion. It could almost be read as an existentialist statement.The scared little Aby is now gone, replaced by a performer in her twenties. And when she dances now, she is controlled, elegant and expressive, with perfect extensions of legs and arms.

Her own self is—as the rest of us—a work-in-progress...ever-shifting, always evolving, like the rhythms of a simple child's song.

Performing at the Tron Theatre until October 17th.

Tags: theatre

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