A brilliantly bodily efficiency from Tom Claxton makes Nick Dawkins’ A Manchester Anthem an actual spotlight of the 2023 VAULT Festival to date
“Oxford isn’t an interstellar journey away, it’s just…south”
There’s a second halfway by means of A Manchester Anthem that’s so completely written (by Nick Dawkins), directed (by Charlie Norburn) and carried out (by Tom Claxton) that you just really feel it’s absolutely destined to grow to be an audition piece for the ages. Deconstructing the politics of the dancefloor and what we reveal about ourselves by means of the best way we dance, it’s an ingenious piece of theatre, scathingly humorous and insightful too because it peels again the facade of teenage artifice.
Tommy is the one doing the psychoanalysing, a working-class Mancunian lad who has parlayed his scholarship to non-public college into a proposal to learn regulation at Oxford and simply earlier than he heads south, he finds himself on an impromptu night time out with the opposite college students from his college who’re Oxbridge-bound. As traces of coke are chopped out, tales about mummy and daddy swapped and basic home tunes banging out, the scene is ready for a raucous night time to recollect.
As the primary in his household to go to uni, the primary on his road even, Dawkins is preoccupied with the rupture that comes from moments of life-altering gravity. Through college and his job at a vastly over-priced espresso store, Tommy is actually nearer to the category divide than most in his life, nevertheless it doesn’t make it any simpler to reconcile the modifications which are to come back, the shifts in his relationship to his divorced mother and father (a dad from whom he’s estranged, a mum whose devotion is fantastically evoked).
Claxton’s confidence as a performer is a delight to behold (he cheekily begins off in his boxers), the abandon that is available in his dancing, the conflicted feelings that play throughout his face, he’s clearly one to observe. As is Norburn, their path filling the appreciable house of the Cage with a implausible vitality as Tommy’s emotion explode memorably on this vividly described night. All it wants is a kebab to spherical issues off correctly.