★★★☆☆
Three Stars
There is nowhere quite like the Burton Taylor studio/attic. On a stormy night, like yesterday, the rain and crackling thunder are all too present within the theatre itself – was that an intentional lighting effect, or did the lightning just blow the studio’s electrics? As for the drama, the Burton Taylor attracts a unique combination of the profound and what can be politely described as drivel. Spoonface Steinberg is no exception.
The play is a one-woman show, in which the eponymous Spoonface Steinberg, a seven year old autistic girl, tells the audience about her life: she’s autistic, she likes opera, she comes from a dysfunctional family and she’s dying from cancer. This ought to pull at the heart-strings. Unfortunately it is just a bit tedious. We all know people die, and sometimes they live and die in ways that seem unfair.
But Lee Hall’s play, bloated with the unclear ramblings of an autistic child, adds little to this – the profoundest thoughts he gives us are a handful of belittling truisms. “The saddest things are the best things of all,” Steinberg repeats from her doctor at one point. Then she relates how her doctor’s mother had been incarcerated in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Thank you, Hall – there is no more patronising a way to provoke an emotional response than by irrelevantly summoning up the Nazis.
If the script is rather lacking, the production is brought back from disaster by the unwavering ability of Alice Porter, who plays Steinberg. She holds the audience’s attention without pause throughout the hour-long show, and never once slips out of the endearing character she has built up. It is hard enough for an adult to copy the physicality of a seven year old, let alone an autistic one, but Porter manages it very convincingly. A nice touch was the way she walked on tip-toe, which is typical of autistic children.
Similarly the set, though simple, convincingly recreates a child’s bedroom. A few toys, along with a framed poster of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, are scattered on the floor and the back wall is obsessively decorated with crayon drawings. A stepladder, covered with a sheet and decorated with fairy-lights, holds the centre-stage and Steinberg uses it for some nice shadow puppetry at one point in the show. I gather the production team were happy with it too; “None of the set fell down – hurrah!” I overheard as I left.
Hall probably intended the saddest part of Spoonface Steinberg to be Steinberg’s final words as she tries to comprehend what nothingness means. The saddest part of this production was the waste of Porter’s talent on such a turnip of a script.
Spoonface Steinberg will be playing at the BT until Saturday 26th October
