‘La Bella’ Edinburgh Fringe review

‘Writer, directors, and actors have worked well to create a tight, striking, and cohesive theatrical model of gendered spheres in art, and the wider world in a way that is both beautiful, and accessible.’

Framed through the relationship between inspiration and creation, artist and muse, Abby Greenhalgh’s La Bella is a fruitful vehicle within which gendered spheres are explored. Using the relationship between Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli and his muse, ‘La Bella Simonetta’, this collaborative piece between Suffragette Theatre Company and Durham University Classical Theatre is engaging, and demonstrates real moments of genius from all involved.

As a foundation, the script was sublime. Greenhalgh has a real skill for blending conversational naturalism with rich and poetic, yet lucid, metaphor. Discussions surrounding female fertility, choice, and emotional turmoil are sensitively and evocatively scripted, and Greenhalgh’s writing oozes with sophistication. Her Sandro is fuelled by a need to create, and her Simonetta by a need to be understood truly, therefore ensuring that, in using the act of creation as expository framework, Greenhalgh’s script exposes gendered spheres and expectations.

An interesting choice by Greenhalgh herself, and associate director Jasmine Starbuck, is the ambiguity of setting. Talk of Renaissance figures, and Italian dinners, are contrapuntal to the actors’ dress, their casual dialogue, and eighties music used in scene transitions, though this dichotomy is never jarring: rather, it serves to reinforce the timelessness of many issues the play strives to explore. The reimagining of characters in an almost timeless setting works fantastically to modernise the play’s crucial themes, and make Greenhalgh’s writing even more accessible.

As Simonetta and Sandro, Honor Calvert and Jacob Cordery are very strong. Cordery practically drips with charisma and Calvert shines as much in moments of defiant self-assertion as in vulnerability. There is real strength especially in their moments of silence, whereby underlying tensions come to the forefront. Within these moments, and elsewhere, it is through eye contact, and the breaking of it, that the two performers wonderfully extract underlying tensions; the two have real stage presence, and command the audience’s eye with clever, subtle choices throughout. Too, in moments where the artist: muse relationship is reversed, the actors shine. Calvert wonderfully extracts vulnerability from Cordery’s Sandro, in a scene where she subjects him to the physical and mental discomforts of being not the viewer, but the viewed. Cordery’s discomfort is palpable, as Sandro attempts to regain control of the situation in a way that much mirrors his own attempts to gain control of his life through art and creation.

Some elements of pacing did, however, feel slightly jarring. Blackouts between scenes disrupted the flow slightly, especially when each new scene began with both characters re-entering the stage: I found myself questioning why Cordery did not remain on stage between scenes to make these transitions smoother. I also felt that the play was overall slightly too still. Whilst the distance between the two for the majority of the play made their eventual tender reconciliation increasingly striking, this distance did not necessitate quite such stillness.  This reconciliation however is supremely acted. Greenhalgh and Starbuck’s direction is superb, and ends the play with a beautiful image through which the female body is reclaimed and loved even when ‘deviant’ from a norm.

La Bella is overall a beautifully written drama, that recreates and reimagines the very act of artistic creation itself. That Greenhalgh’s Simonetta is so vividly intricate and multi-faceted is the true success of this performance, relieving Simonetta, even if only momentarily, of her historical position as ‘La Bella’. Writer, directors, and actors have worked well to create a tight, striking, and cohesive theatrical model of gendered spheres in art, and the wider world in a way that is both beautiful, and accessible.

By Sarah Kelly

‘La Bella’ runs until the 25th August at C Arts Aurora at 12:00 each day.