You’re not like the other girls Chrissy
By Caroline Horton
Caroline Horton & Co and China Plate, Southwark Playhouse.
Performed in English
Walking back to my rented flat after witnessing Caroline Horton’s one-woman tour de force, a funny thing happened – I started sobbing with what I can only describe as pure joy.
Whats On Stage
Gathers in both charm and emotional engagement until even a hardened hack may be on the brink of tears.
Financial Times
As funny as it is touching… one of the most enjoyable and emotional hours you can experience in a theatre.
The Wee Review
A beautiful demonstration of one theatre-maker’s skill and a loving portrait of one ordinary yet extraordinary woman.
Exeunt
The Dragon is simultaneously a light-hearted rendition of a fairy tale and a very serious political satire that fully justifies a trip down to the Elephant and Castle.
British Theatre Guide
If the overall parable is clear enough, its enactment is still startling, and drag on the performance certainly does not.
Reviewsgate
When Paris is liberated in January 1945, Christiane, an eccentric and acutely myopic Parisian waits at Gare Du Nord for a ticket to England to be reunited with her fiancé, Cyril, in England. Whilst she waits, she finds herself recounting the extraordinary story of her love affair with Cyril, a tongue-tied teacher from Staffordshire. From a chance encounter at Cheadle tennis club, Chrissy’s story takes us on to cosmopolitan 1930s Paris before war interrupts their unlikely romance.
You’re not like the other girls Chrissy was Caroline Horton’s first self-penned piece, and she’s gone on to become a fantastic storyteller and idiosyncratic theatre maker who work is always pushing boundaries.
I
Cast
Caroline Horton
Creative Team
Omar Elerian (Co-Director), Daniel Goldman (Co-Director), Clare Betney (Dramaturg/Assistant Director), Ben Pacey (Lighting Designer), Rachel Bunce (Filmmaker)
The Dragon was a “flop”. It was a flop at the box office, it got some nice reviews but it was, as the critics noted, uneven in places. Sometimes you have to accept that you tried your best to do something exciting and interesting… and that you didn’t quite get there.
What we were trying to do was create a show where the audience might be invited to act to save the characters in the play and, if they did not, then be held responsible for the fate of the characters. But even that was made complicated by the fact that we built a repressive system into the play making it a literal lose lose situation for the audience. That’s to say, if they spoke out, they were “murdered” by the tyrants in power and asked/forced to leave the auditorium. If they didn’t speak out, they were blamed for their passivity.
It was an exploration of audience activity and passivity, an exploration we’d started with Fuente Ovejuna, and with many of the same actors, our interest was to go further and to a darker place, with The Dragon. We were trying to blur the lines between theatre and political activity, between audience, participant and person… and we did so with only limited success.
That said, I’m proud that we made a show that stuck in people’s guts. I think we made something that was unsettling and important, and even if it was a flop, I have no regrets. It was a fascinating production to put together and a huge learning curve and a show that I think was prescient in terms of the huge political shifts towards populist mdeia led right wing governments and Brexit and Trumpism that all emerged in the following couple of years.
All photos ©