Lee Hall is best known for Billy Elliot, but in 1997 his play Spoonface Steinberg was broadcast by the BBC to great acclaim. The dramatic monologue that movingly spans the particular and the universal was performed on Radio 4 by an 11-year-old Becky Simpson who won two awards for her performance.
The aria Casta Nova from Bellini’s opera Norma and sung by Maria Callas opens the story of Spoonface, named so because of her perfectly round features that resemble a spoon’s reflection.
It is delivered as the stream of consciousness of this young Jewish girl who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and knows that people in operas die beautifully and that beautiful music, even in the direst of circumstances, like in a concentration camp, can lift the heart.
The daughter of academics, this special child calls herself ‘backward’ because of a possible accident or careless handling when a soft-headed baby. In fact she is autistic with a great capacity for dates and numbers in spite of never having learned to read.
Dressed in pyjamas and a woollie hat, Sasha Brooks flawlessly recalls Hall’s exquisitely written script that lets us share the singular view of life of this illiterate wee girl whose emotional intelligence allows her to be utterly tuned in to the universe.
She is in turn fatalistic and philosophical as she witnesses her mother’s drinking and her father’s ‘floozieing’, whose revelation is significantly coupled with Puccini’s O mi babbino caro, while dealing with her own imminent death, while finding ways of making her remaining life special.
Brooks, who looks too bright to be ‘backwards,’ gives an accomplished performance that could have been given more edge by taking a lesson from Morwena Banks who played the Little Girl in Absolutely, giving her more genuine ingenuousness. That said, her delivery of Spoonface’s naturalistic speech patterns with the moving message of ‘finding the sparks’ is what impacts in this memorable piece of theatre. She speaks of secular prayers that involve the simple everyday actions of the likes of smiling, helping, walking and loving, yet ends, as we all may, with a hedge-betting religious prayer.
Spoonface Steiberg is in itself a haunting prayer to hope and humanity. Top marks to Top Right Theatre for bringing it to the Fringe.
15th - 27th August (not 21st), 4.10pm