Girls are made of an ungroomed set criss-crossed with wires that are probably a trip hazard. Girls are made of using a hand-held microphone in a space where the audience can probably hear every word you say without it anyway. Girls are made of taking up most of the stage space with a drum-kit, leaving yourself with only a small square to move in, and still transporting the audience to a whole new world. Girls should want to made of whatever Cora Bissett is made of.
Bissett is glorious. Her writing is both a scripted reading and a spontaneous telling; her musical days might be long past, but her storming success as a performer is right now. She re-enacts her teenage life from her diaries without slipping into the cheesy or the sentimental, instead capturing with such astute subtlety and attention to detail the naïve courage and determination of a young Scottish girl with a dream. On that stage Bissett seems to be ageless: she might start off as a forty-year-old looking back on her teenage days, but by the time she’s in full flow I’ve already forgotten that she’s telling this story at all. There is such a heart-breaking grace in her shift between declaring (when the music career is ending) that there is a fire in her belly which gets shit done and breaking down in tears when she wonders, in a bar toilet, when is it my turn? And through all of this she never once forgets her audience. She leads us through the ups and downs with such a dignity that we cannot help but fall a little bit in love with her.
The boys in this show aren’t so bad, either. Harry Ward’s impressions are achingly funny as he jumps from one supporting character in Bissett’s life to the next. His roles range from an outraged, hairdryer-less mother to a spitting school bully to a night-after tour manager to a dodgy record label agent, and each one seems to have its own pitch. Even when he plays a character for one line, Ward’s delivery is so subtly confident that the audience doesn’t know whether to roar with laughter or gape in awe. Simon Donaldson, on Cora’s other side, is a marvel with his facial expressions, and his rendition of Cora’s father as he slips into dementia-d old age, if it makes us laugh, makes us laugh softly and bitterly through the tears. Emma Smith plays the ‘shit-hot’ drummer: she might have fewer lines, but her drumming commands an entire audience’s attention on that raised platform in the middle of the stage. These three are not just complements to Bissett’s piece: in constructing with their voices, faces and bodies what this show lacks in set and costume, they complete the performance of a life.
Because this is truly a group piece. I like to think that’s why it’s called ‘What Girls are Made of’ and not ‘Cora Bissett’. In contents, it might be the story of her life alone, but in its telling it’s a track for a whole band. The most impressive part of this performance is its sense of rhythm, emphasised by the songs and the fact that these are musicians – a reminder that singing and speaking on stage, playing the guitar or drums and speaking on stage, share an essential need for, indeed a desire for, rhythm. There is such a slickness to this performance which I don’t think is merely the result of a month of performances at the Fringe; it tells too, of a chemistry, or perhaps more accurately, a harmony between the people on stage which mesmerises the audience. They are skilled actors, very talented musicians, but most of all, they are four performers who are here to give us a performance.
The end is a huge romanticised indulgence. We can’t deny it. Bissett imagines telling her little girl ‘what girls are made of’. She sings a song, and tells her that girls are made of gang-huts and stilts and go-carts, and first loves and last loves and all the in-between loves. If you’d told me it ended like this before the play started, I probably would have said it sounds cheesy and over-done. But somehow, by the end of this play, I didn’t mind allowing Bissett this indulgence. In this mess of amps and wires, she has convinced me that even if it doesn’t work, you have to ride that horse to the ends of the earth. She has also convinced me that, as far as I’m concerned, Cora Bissett is Patti Smith.