Bullish on Tour
These last couple of weeks have been super busy working with Milk Presents to get Bullish ready for its UK tour that started yesterday in Petersfield, Hampshire and is moving onto Southampton today before going across a number of locations across the UK. So, because of this busy-ness I thought I’d do something a bit different this week in the blog and talk about the kind of stuff I’ve been doing the last few weeks to help Bullish get ready to go on tour.
I was very lucky that Bullish is a show that has been in development for quite some time at this point, and I had been able to work on it when it was at the Camden People’s Theatre last year in my first professional costume job, assisting designer Emma Bailey with some of the costumes. This meant that as they started working on the updated script a few weeks ago, the groundwork was already laid for the costumes. Many items had been bought across the previous iterations of the show so Emma and I already had a lot of the items that we needed, it was more about adapting and updating the costumes to match the new version of the script and grabbing a few extra items for new characters or to adapt to the change in other characters.
Let’s start by looking at the base costumes for each of the actors. In the last iteration it was key that each of the actors brought their own personality into their costumes. The base costumes for each of the actors when they were acting collectively as Asterion, the central character, in the previous iteration were extremely individualised to reflect what each actor had brought to the script as they had helped devise some of the scenes. However, in this new development of the script and with adjustments in staging the four had become more of a cohesive unit, they had become much more one Asterion. To accommodate this and bring that through into the costumes, they become much more unified, having grey running through each of their costumes while still choosing items that kept them individual and brought some of the actor’s personality through. So part of what I was doing was grabbing items to replace the old ones to bring together a more cohesive look for the four Asterions.
With this move into a more muted palette for Asterion, there was room to bring colour through in other ways. One of these ways which I think was highly effective was adapting the costume for Theseus. In Bullish, Theseus is a physical manifestation of toxic masculinity and the patriarchy. He had previously been costumed in a grey t shirt with a deep V-neck and tight jeans with a phallic necklace. Emma wanted to maintain this general look for the design but thought it would be great to put him in a red or burgundy rather than grey so that his entrance onto the stage is jarring and breaks through the grey the audience have grown accustomed to. So this was another shopping task that I think really helped make Theseus’ entrance onto stage even more effective and making him look out of place among the rest of the cast.
The new script also brought in the new character of Phobus, the god of fear and panic placed in a doctor/receptionist role, taking Asterion deep inside the labyrinth of hospital appointments and confusing forms as they attempt to transition from minotaur to man. Alongside this new character, there were developments in the characters of Daedalus, the inventor and Pasiphae, the mother that required adjustments in their costumes.
Beginning with Phobus, Leo and Emma really loved the idea of an optical illusion pattern for this character. Everything Phobus says is confusing and complicated and the optical illusion pattern would really manifest this confusion in a physical form. They also loved the idea of a trench coat, almost like a Matrix style look. Unfortunately, marrying these two ideas was trickier than first hoped. After a lot of searching for many different styles of coat and different patterns, we were able to settle on a great Matrix-esque black trench coat that I added some great warped chequerboard fabric to the cuffs of the coat, to still bring that idea of confusion through. On top of this I had found some great sunglasses in a charity shop that gave Phobus a look of Morpheus from the Matrix to them. As for Daedalus, the inventor, this character had moved from being a bit of a Del Boy character where Emma had gotten them a great distressed parka, into more of a futuristic mad scientist character. The idea behind the look was almost like they were a cyborg, or like the Neolutionists in the popular BBC series, Orphan Black. To bring this look in it was decided that hi-vis and neon were key. We got a great neon yellow visor from Cyberdog and got a standard hi-vis jacket that Emma deconstructed and altered to make it into a more tailored, high fashion waistcoat. The outfit looked amazing under the lighting and I think it really brought forth the new side of the wacky inventor. Finally there was the development in Pasiphae’s character. Although the mother was played very similarly to before, her role was much more prominent in the new script. Before, Amelia had simply added a light scarf to transform into the character of the mother but Emma and Leo wanted something more ‘mum-sy’ and more of a change. This came in the form of a thick cardigan. I think this change to a cardigan worked really well and Amelia used it wonderfully to add to their acting, wrapping it tightly around them to really physicalise Pasiphae’s concern for Asterion.
Developing and adapting these looks in Bullish’s short two week rehearsal period was definitely a challenge and there were certainly some last minute purchases the day before I travelled down to join the cast and creative team on their first stop on the tour at Bedales School in Petersfield, but I think it all really came together well and I cannot wait for the rest of the UK to see such an incredible show. The cast and everyone involved have worked so hard on it and I think the tour is going to be amazing. So if you happen to be nearby any of the venues that Milk Presents are heading to I would really encourage you to go and see it! I’ve listed all the tour dates and locations below and you can check out more at www.milkpresents.com
September:
20th and 21st – City Studio, Nuffield Theatre, Southampton
22nd – South Street Arts Centre, Reading
25th – Burton Taylor Studio, Oxford Playhouse, Oxford
27th to 29th – The Walker Studio, Theatre Royal, Wakefield
October:
8th – Seagull Theatre, Lowestoft
9th – The Garage, Norwich
11th – Arena Theatre, Wolverhampton
12th to 14th – Derby Theatre Studio, Derby
29th to 31st – HOME, Manchester
November:
1st to 3rd – Back to Ours Festival, Hull
7th – Cambridge Junction, J2, Cambridge
9th and 10th – KEY Theatre Studio, Peterborough
15th – Square Chapel, Copper Auditorium, Halifax
17th and 18th – Exeter Phoenix, Exeter
20th to 23rd – Wales Millennium Centre, Weston Studio, Cardiff
29th and 30th – Lighthouse Poole’s Centre for the Arts, The Sherling Studio, Poole
December:
1st – Lighthouse Poole’s Centre for the Arts, The Sherling Studio, Poole
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