We sent our reviewer James to watch BearGirl

You can imagine the Roxyboxy at Assembly Roxy (essentially a cargo crate retrofitted into a small studio theatre), being used to transport wild animals in an adventure film from the Golden Age of Hollywood. As such, it is the perfect venue for the intimate tale of a widow dressed as a bear that is, BearGirl.

BearGirl opens strongly with the eponymous hero rushing into the shop where the bear costume has been gathering dust for years and stumbling over an explanation even she herself struggles to understand, as to why she has to buy it. She needs it because her husband has died, is what she manages.

Her best friend dismisses the bear costume as a cry for attention. To prove him wrong, she announces that she needs to go back to the beginning. And so we step into the flashback which will make up the majority of the play, beginning with when she first met her husband, many years before they began seeing each other, when he was a university lecturer and she was his student.

This is where the problems with the work start, and I think it is important at this point to make a wee note as to why I am unable to recommend BearGirl and why it has attracted such a low star rating. This is not possible without some spoilers, so if you’d prefer not to know, please skip to the next forward a few paragraphs.

The central relationship is presented throughout as a tragic love story, and in the marketing material as ‘a complicated love affair’. It is neither of these things. Rather it is a coercive and ultimately abusive relationship with a significant power imbalance between the protagonist and her lover, which is romanticised and even on occasion made a source of humour. I kept hoping that this would be addressed at some point, problematised, that this would be the main message of the play, but unfortunately it never was.

Intentionally or not, we are then left with the valorisation of abuse masquerading as ‘complex’ romance. The general content notes on the Fringe website for ‘distressing or potentially triggering themes’, are obviously good, but this is such a potent and highly damaging trope that I feel some more specific indication should appear somewhere in either the marketing material or warnings boxes. People with experience of this kind of trauma need to be able to make informed choices. I know I would have thought twice about attending if I had known this.

Moving on. The writing flows easily in the mouths of the two very talented actors, Rachel De Fontes as BearGirl and Jimmy Kavanagh skilfully juggling a cornucopia of other characters. The light-handed direction is also good, especially in ambiguous moments when it seems it may be possible that the costume is no longer just a metaphor for BearGirl’s state of mind.

Overall – with the specific, significant caveats mentioned above – the production works well. BearGirl is on until at the end of the month.

Rating: ** 2 stars

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