Biz Lyon as Marcy Credit: Henri T
Catherine Mieses as Colleen Credit: Henri T
Biz Lyon as Marcy and Catherine Mieses as Colleen Credit: Henri T
No matter how well-known you are, a single act can all but erase your history and redefine you as something else entirely. O J Simpson isn't remembered as an American football player, actor or television personality as much as a murderer.
So it is for rising country music star Marcy Aurora in Lee Papa's Midnight in Nashville, first seen last year in Edinburgh and now playing at The Glitch in London.
What took Marcy on the journey from famous to infamous was the manslaughter of her husband after years of domestic abuse.
Now, two decades on, Marcy is out of gaol and wanting to resurrect her singing career, although the contemporary media are more interested in her past than her present. So, they can't or don't want to move on from that, but Marcy wants to prove she can and she has.
Midnight finds her still working in a Nashville recording studio telling stories and trying out songs for a new album with sound technician Colleen. Her performance is imperfect but determined as one might expect from someone who has been away from a mic for so long, but with the supportive if tough Colleen, we see Marcy find her new voice through trial and error.
In this play with music, the live songs are a mix of original and old folk and blues pieces accompanied by piano or guitar. More serviceable than captivating, they come with a sincere emotion that serves to reveal a tenderness that Macy can't afford to put on show elsewhere in her life.
Songs and anecdotes aside, the backbone of Marcy's experiences emerge from an historic radio interview that the two listen to between creating songs. It's a bit of a clumsy device, particularly when Papa is more than capable of writing purposeful and economic dialogue. More of that please.
What makes Biz Lyon's Marcy appealing is the dry edge with which she delivers some of her lines, and what makes her interesting is a lack of bitterness or regret at the hand fate dealt her.
Papa's narrative makes her a thoughtful if matter-of-fact advocate for women doing whatever it takes to save themselves. It is this strain of realism—her wish to "get back some of what she was", Colleen's harsh offer to "de-age" her voice in post production transitioning to her encouragement to "let them hear the flaws ... what prison did to you"—that lingers in the emotional memory without a saccharine aftertaste.
At an hour, the show doesn't give itself time to realise a meaningful endpoint, even with the benefit of a late reveal. It is a given that Marcy is still at the start of a new journey, but laying down an album for the first time in twenty years is seismic, and the experience shouldn’t leave her unchanged.