Megan Drury in SELENE
IN a new creative partnership with Theatre@41, Monkgate, Easingwold duo Wright & Grainger workshopped and rehearsed SELENE at the York theatre before actor Megan Drury headed off to Australia and New Zealand for a Bob Dylanesque never-ending tour that stretched eventually to more than 70 performances.
SELENE is a solo show for Drury, such an electric force on stage, who was so vital to the spoken-word gig theatre chemistry of Edinburgh and Australian Fringe hit THE GODS THE GODS THE GODS, but the imprint of partner Alexander Flanagan Wright’s rhythmic wordplay, cultural nous and philosophical insights and Phil Grainger’s lambent compositions is as deep as ever.
Wright & Grainger specialise in breathing new life into ancient myths, refracting the tales of Orpheus, Euridyce and Helios through the prism of the troubled modern world, often a rural Yorkshire one to boot yet universal too.
SELENE is the latest such venture, billed as a “radical explosion” of the ancient Greek tale of the goddess of the Moon and its dark side that once fixated Pink Floyd.
Dressed all in black with glittering trainers and ear rings, Drury immediately establishes that SELENE – pronounced Sel-ee-nay, not Celine, as in Dion, she clarifies – will not be the fulcrum of the story.
Instead, the focus falls on Selene’s already assertive 12-year-old daughter, Pandia (or ‘Panda’ as everyone calls her), whose fascination with the Moon will be followed at four-yearly intervals.
Drury’s Panda/Pandia will introduce each scene with an update of her/their list of All The Things I Am Not, always kick-started by her frustration at not being weightless, ever since she started watching Apollo 11’s landing on repeat.
She is fearless, frank, bloody-minded even, likes the F word and considers the chalk horse at Kilburn, not far from her home, to be “stupid”. She finds pretty much everything and everyone irritating, especially that horse and Benzo, who is always trying to outdo her with his knowledge of the Moon and its cycles.
In Wright & Grainger house style, the performance is conversational, knocking down theatre’s fourth wall from the off, and immersive too, all the more so for being staged in the round to match the shape of a full moon. Assorted moons will decorate Theatre@41’s black box theatre in differing forms and sizes, each switched on and off by Drury, depending on a scene’s requirement and focus.
Pages from the script, again placed in a circle at the audience’s feet, are a familiar W&G sign of imminent involvement for all those who volunteer to take on roles, in this case playing wild card Panda’s friends/classroom colleagues from schooldays onwards, through various party initiations, lunar experiences, first drinks, skinny dips, first encounters with Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide and morning-after breakfasts with mum Selene.
Another mythical world will stir too, the one where dogs become werewolves at twilight, and again two volunteers take on howling duty, later joined by the entire audience.
As Panda turns into a young adult, discovering who and why they are, Wright & Grainger’s SELENE becomes an ever more humorous, intellectually smart and typically unconventional study of “the light sides of us, the dark sides of us, the things orbiting around us as we grow up and especially the wild stuff inside us”.
Not only is SELENE a joyously wild ride through a rites of passage, but it also rivals Sir Patrick Moore for interesting observations and facts on the Moon, gives belated attention to Michael Collins’s lonely role on that 1969 lunar trip and points out Apollo was a misnomer for a space ship to the Moon, given that Apollo was the sun god.
By now, Drury’s relentless, questing Panda/Pandia/whatever they want to call themself next finally lists All The Things I Am. “The truth,” she says. Oh for such certainty in our world of half truths, alternative truths and Truth Social.