This was not your typical touring one-woman show. “Passionate Machine”, created and performed by Rosy Carrick, mixed single mother autobiography with quantum physics, Russian philosophy with loud and cheesy dance music, and references to almost every Hollywood time travel film of the last fifty years. Funky, comedic and mind-blowingly cerebral all at once, tonight’s performance occupied its place in the space-time continuum at the Edge Theatre, Manchester.
The sparse set contained just a multi-media screen upstage, and a metal table of books and props downstage right. Carrick wandered around a little, and entertainingly interacted with her multi-media, but primarily this was a flow of spoken words and ideas and adventure in the mind’s eye. And the audience lapped up every moment of it, travelling with her to whatever flight of fancy she wanted to bring up.
The very twisted and convoluted plot began with Carrick’s own childhood habit of writing notes to her short-term future self – “Remember PE kit” – expanding out to writing notes to her longer-term future self….. and then her future self wrote a note back. From 1920's Russia. A plot device nicked straight out of “Back To The Future III” (this reviewer likes Hollywood time travel films too…..) had a modern Russian man handing to Carrick’s character an antiquated letter addressed to her, explaining that her future self had built a time machine, gone back to 1927 to obsess over her passion for the real-life Russian poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky who was alive at that time, and was now stuck in the past. The letter contained a lot of technical information and a drawing of the part of the time machine that needed fixing. Please could Carrick sort it out, and rescue her.
As Carrick’s character was an arty bohemian in Brighton, raising a teenage daughter, getting massively drunk regularly, and admiring Arnold Schwarzenegger’s abs whenever possible, this was a very big ask. In one of the best scenes, she spent a lot of time writing and re-writing an advertisement on Gumtree for a “mad scientist”-type who could help her. How else would she find such a person? After a deluge of incredulous messages from non-scientist readers – email being the modern written note - a sober and anonymous scientific-sounding person did get in touch. And I’ll let the story rest there.
At the curtain call, an exuberant Carrick said that everything in the play (apart from the time travel) was absolutely true and from her own life, and we could look at her props. I immediately was turning over the books on the props table, pages of which had appeared on the multi-media screen during the performance as part of the script. She does have an edition of a book by Yelena Mayakovskaya (Mayakovsky’s daughter), with a handwritten dedication to Carrick and a comment that she’s an “old soul.” In the anthology of Mayakovsky’s plays, there is a passage in “The Bathhouse” describing a time machine and referring to HG Wells, and the Phosphorescent Woman is a time traveller from the 21st century (presented in “Passionate Machine” as Carrick’s stranded future self.) Clever, clever, clever.
This is Rosy Carrick’s first theatrical production, and I dearly hope that she does more.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 22/11.19
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