Review by Simon Jenner, May 3rd 2025
A child’s found locked in a trunk in a cargo ship. Her dead young mother lies nearby, clutching a letter. The child becomes a ward of court. But she – finds she’s… Heather Alexander’s Becoming Maverick which plays The Actors Pub directed by Tina Pelini till May 4th.
Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Alexander, with such one-person shows as Room and Havisham, respectively on Virginia Woolf and Dickens’ character has proved a consummate creator of material she both act and directs. This is far more oblique and intriguing, indeed original. Alexander is clearly developing unique material and Becoming Maverick seems a transitional piece, with a reveal at the end that suddenly clicks everything into another world.
There’s some fine blue lighting at the outset, as Alexander sitting downstage, legs dangling, looks impassive, inset. She soon blazes into childish life, frightened, with a male voiceover (uncredited, but good) intones both a judge then a male voice: one of authority and reveal. Sir Cain Hemsley though will have to wait.
Deploying rhyming couplets with often baroque adjectives “Byzantine snakes” Alexander now moves between heightened verse and prose delivery. It’s a new departure.
Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Alexander’s particularly strong on tenebrous fright, skittish playfulness bordering on the grotesque or horrified, sometimes gleefully crossing into the derangement of all senses. Here she inhabits an overwrought being, sometimes uncomfortably close. There’s reasons for this, as we travel with this five-year-old, unnamed for the most part, as she’s taken to a Plymouth institution. Alexander employs a rail of dresses and uniform garb as she endures years of an institution hostile to her. She one day escapes, sets off the alarm in a London fashion shop and emerges fully-clad as a sixteen-year-old young “lady” who then secures a position as governess by knocking on doors Fitzroy Square luckily contains the irascible Sir Cain Hemsley who wants nothing more than to see his daughter, Rebecca, eleven, out of the way, as he woos a wife who proves after enduring the vicious Cain, increasingly unstable and drunk.
Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Photo Credit: Peter Williams
A tense bonds forms, over the years between the girls, brought to an end one September 19th when Cain decides drunkenly to do two things. The heroine has been told: “As a child you do as you’re told, as a woman you do as you must.” She lives by this. And then the two girls seek a future.
One reveal I guessed early on, the second I would never have worked out. The show will settle into something special, and overall this is the cleverest piece of writing Alexander has written. There’s a certain refinement of tone and perhaps more chiaroscuro in the handling of prose and verse might heighten the overwrought child even further. But this will travel to Hastings and Edinburgh. Catch it there if not here, and in the area. Alexander has arrived as a creative, not simply re-creative force. A cause for dark celebration.
Tech and Lighting The Actors.
Photo Credit: Peter Williams
