Take yourself back to the hypnotic music scene of Manchester in the 1990s to find the less happy scene of a musical waif of a teenager, Kelly Roberts. Kelly is not doing well on any front.
Writer Colette Forde, Dublin born, grew up in Manchester and says of her troubled character that “I guess a lot of the stuff in ‘innit’, the bullying, the single parent factor, the absent father..The story is about the isolation of this teenager and a lot of the stuff that happened to her, happened to me”.
Fear not a glum tale of self pity as Forde is now taking ‘innit’ around schools as a vehicle to destigmatise therapy for teens. It becomes part of a two-hour interactive workshop that melts “the constant armour” that threatened children can adopt.
A singer and songwriter as well, the likeable actor/ playwright shot music videos of songs that she wrote to amp up the theatricality. The battle axe of a mother is delivered in comic voiceover and Kelly cracks a dance in the spotlight projected onto backdrop.
Colette Forde uses the construct of a compulsory therapy session in the school’s lunch hour for Kelly to address the audience, ‘the fourth wall’. “She’s really funny and she is really foul mouthed. Stories start to unfold and we discover that some boys at this school are picking on her because she doesn’t have a big chest.”
Impersonating her father and taking off a neighbour that causes her fragile home grief lend to Kelly’s dream to be a performer but “her mother can’t afford stage school. They hardly have the money to buy a packet of fish fingers”.
‘innit’ fades out to strains of Kelly’s song ‘This Girl’, delicately voicing her despair. Check out this emotional, entertaining 50minute piece at Chez le Fab, April 5, 6, 7. Booking at www.limerickfringe.com
