Presented by Katie Hurley and Sarah Hehir in association with Croydonites

Review by Olivia Burns

Red Lecture Theatre at Summerhall

“Would you rather find yourself stuck alone in the forest with a man or a bear?”. Although never directly asked at any point in the show, Man Or Bear is a cutting indictment of modern life where the universal tie between women appears to be their life underneath the lurking and impending threat of male violence.

Created by Katie Hurley and Sarah Hehir, we are led through the journey of Paige (Hurley), struggling with the all-too-real threats of single motherhood whilst establishing independence from her abusive ex-partner. Hehir’s writing is distinctly characterised by her attention to fissure, punctuating the narrative with refrains of metrical poeticisms that bring us away from Paige’s world, involving the audience in an intrusive and brave polemicism of male violence.

Playing Paige’s daughter, Angel, Amaia Naima Aguinaga totally excels with a remarkable talent for self-transformation, running through the motions of the teenage girl, all-at-once energetic, charismatic, emotional, self-assured and brave, remaining- at all times- one hundred percent believable and true. Hurley’s Paige is similarly impressive, as is Lesley Ewen’s effective characterisation as both Paige’s landlord and her exceptionally threatening ex, but it is Aguinaga’s performance in particular that elevates the production’s raw emotionalism and cutting storytelling.

Director Ursual Martinez astutely maximises Hehir’s stylistic fissure, guiding the production’s aesthetics with thematic attention to separation: the characters hardly talk to each other face-to-face, often facing in opposite directions during conversation. Whilst this is definitely a well-informed and intelligent choice (given the written structure of the play’s chronology and the limited stage-space of Summerhall’s Red Lecture Theatre), this overall loyalty to the aesthetics of fragmentation at times are a little incongruous to the play’s overall celebration of the remarkable bond between women under threat.

Undoubtedly, however, Man Or Bear is sensitive, deliberate, cutting and clever, making no efforts to disguise the universal truth that, whilst most of our experience with bears remain in the make-believe world of the fairytale, our concrete experiences of men have led us to wish upon these dangerous fantasies, rather than face the abundant realities of gendered violence.

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