PARAGON DREAMS
rainy October . Hull, England. The week of an infamous travelling fair. A traveller returns in the dead of night.
15 years ago, Hannah’s mother ‘Michaela Midnight’, a singer on the local club scene, disappeared. The only trace, her abandoned car and heels found deserted on the banks of a river estuary.
What happened that night? What’s Uncle Stan keeping in the old launderette? And who is the girl from the takeaway?
Sometimes you have to get lost to work out a new exit.
Sharp, gritty, poetic and fierce - this one-woman tour de force that dazzles like the lights of the fair and leaves you wanting more.
Reality bites, so dream big. Paragon Dreams. Things are not always what they seem.
‘Paragon Dreams is precisely what its title invokes. It drifts dreamlike through spoken word sequences and creative technical expression. In many ways, it expresses the pinnacle of what theatre is capable of. It is dynamic and highly theatrical, its storytelling is slick, clever and expertly crafted. Two parts mystery one part family drama, it pulls the audience through a cyclical maze of twists and turns.
Hester Ullyart’s performance is breath taking. A writer-performer, she carries the production with vigour and works in seamless synergy with the many outstanding production elements contained within this show.’
****A YOUNGER THEATRE.
PARAGON DREAMS REVIEW, YORKSHIRE POST
By Phil Penfold.
*****
There are those of us who, when we examine a theatre programme before the lights go down, become aware of a rather nasty shudder of fear vibrating up and down the spine. This dread vibration is frequently caused by reading that the show just about to be set out before us has been conceived and written by one person, and that it will also be performed by them. It can get worse. There are occasions when they have also directed themselves, and have also had the effrontery to write the music as well. Objectivity goes out of the window, and vanity comes swooping in.
The only person to rise above all this self-indulgence, and to (almost) constantly triumph, was the late Sir Noel Coward, and there are precious few who could even begin to emulate his skills. But Hull’s own Hester Ullyart has decided to go where few will venture with any confidence and, in her new play, emerges unscathed, and with triumph. If you ever incline to the belief that good, original story-telling is dead, then an evening in Hester’s company is highly recommended. No. Change that to “absolutely imperative”.
In the span of (incredibly) just one hour, she gives us the charged and emotional story of a young woman who returns to her roots on the banks of the Humber, in an attempt to restore some sort of contact with her lost daughter, and to find the reasons for her mother’s death by drowning. The twist here is that we finally discover her own rather gruesome secret. There are too many “original” plays around today with ideas that are trite, and too repetitively stressed, or where the author’s tone is either embittered or sentimentally, effusively, fulsome. Ms. Ullyart is not that sort of writer – or performer.
She is deft, she is clever (and that is meant in a complimentary sense), and she knows, in old-fashioned terms, how to spin a yarn. And she has some impressive support around her. There is some non-intrusive but entirely appropriate music from Joe Roper, and (this is key) first rate sound and video design from Mathew Clowes, with lighting from Jess Addinall. All display outstanding talent in their fields. Mark Babych directs, and keeps our solo turn focused and in a position where she prods her audience into thought. A melodrama is a play whose author is more interested in the impact that events are having on his or her audience, than in the impact on their characters. Not so here. We are all wanting to find out the truth behind the troubled and confused Hannah, the reasons for her behaviour, and the completed jigsaw of her enigmatic past.
Here we have that rare thing – a play that is both honestly felt, and truly expressed. The bonus is that there isn’t a single second in which we feel we are being led down a garden path of dishonesty or contrivance. Ullyart writes with skill, she speaks her lines with passion, and she is always believable. Now that, dear readers, is a rarity that has to be visited, and appreciated.
