Girls and Boys

After huge success in the West End and on Broadway, Tony Award-winning British playwright Dennis Kelly (Matilda: The Musical), was produced by MTC in 2022. Performed by Nikki Sheils, with direction by Kate Champion, the work is a solo performance exploring family violence. It is a difficult work and poses huge challenges to the actor - who holds the stage alone for 2hours whilst detailing a devastating story of violence and loss. In addition to the demands of the text, , the actor must ‘mime’ all of her interactions with the other characters of the narrative, including those with her two young children. I was brought in as a Mime Consultant to work with Nikki in rehearsal to develop the physical score. The task was really more about physically story telling than the use of pure mime but we nonetheless worked with mime technique and principles to detail her interactions with the other characters- using techniques such as fixed point, gaze, effort dynamics. It was fascinating to watch both Nikki and Kate navigate the demands of this work in rehearsal and in performance. Importantly, the physical score and mimed elements had to serve the character’s emotional journey through the narrative - there was a balance to find between technique and mime precision, and a looser approach that allowed the actor to indicate in service of her emotional arc, rather tha focus on perfect/precise mimed illustrations.