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Life amid echoes of the past The Forensics Of A Flat
Birmingham Rep
****
When Francesca Millican-Slater moved into a 1970’s flat in South
Birmingham she lost her heart to its wooden panelling, its colourful
carpeting and its flickering strip lights. While many
of us love the places we live, few of us would think of turning that
relationship into a theatre show. But that is just what Millican-Slater
has done with The Forensics Of A Flat. Staged at Birmingham Rep’s The
Door, the production is a monologue with songs and slides which
recreates her experiences in the flat and its history. In doing so, we come across a
whole range of colourful characters. There’s ‘Landlord’ who constantly
asks her how long she wants to stay as he has high hopes of
modernisation.
Francesca brings the flat
alive with humorous descriptions, photos and floor plans so that we soon
know our way around its nooks and crannies. It is certainly idiosyncratic
and the reason for that becomes clear as Francesca shares its story with
us. Over the years the building, which housed a shop on the ground
floor, has had a number of guises including a fruit and vegetable shop,
where the women held court while the men went to war, and a television
repair shop – whose demise was brought about by cheap televisions and
the computer age.
Her flat was formerly the
offices for the television company and she reveals that the lounge used
to be the board room and the bedroom was the stationery room. Millican-Slater has dedicated
hours of research into not just the history of her own building but also
the surrounding area and she vividly recreates the heyday of local
cinema, the excitement of a new row of shops and the optimism of the
planners who believed the future lay in urbanisation. But there is plenty of tragedy
and sadness here as we see the demise of certain industries, the
replacement of some amenities and the sometimes unpleasantly judgemental
society of the past. During her digging, Francesca comes across the
history of a building known as The Haunch where ‘feeble-minded women’
were kept away from the prying eyes of neighbours. Sadly, she tells us,
in most cases these women were characterised as such just for having
children when they weren’t married. Francesca is an engaging
performer. She has a gift for lively story-telling and an audience
naturally warms to her. It is a skill honed in her successful one-woman
show Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs, in which she recounted her attempts to
track down the identity of ‘Miss Gibbs’ after discovering a note on the
back of a postcard. At 90 minutes, The Forensics
Of A Flat would benefit from a bit of trimming, but it is entertaining
and thought-provoking. How many of us actually know the history of our
own homes or local areas and the people and the stories hidden in their
walls? The flat itself has already
moved on. Francesca tells us she now lives underneath as Landlord took
out the panelling and threw away the carpets, replacing it with magnolia
walls and cream carpets. Unwilling to live there in its new guise she
chose a different flat in the same building where we can hope she is
already at work devising a new tale to share with audiences. Diane Parkes
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There
are his ‘Boys’ who paint the door of her flat while she is inside
without her even knowing. There are the bakers in the café who call her
Laura for months on end. And there is the flat itself.