Review: Live at the Quarry - Brothers Across The Decades

Weston Super Mare, one of England’s oldest seaside resorts, nestled on the Severn Estuary and famed for its mud, donkey rides, and Grand Pier, is seeing something of a cultural regeneration recently. Central to this upsurge is The Old Town Quarry securing its future as a new hub for arts events earlier this year, and the work of Theatre Orchard, delivering a wide range of creative opportunities and exciting events, not just in Weston Super Mare but throughout the whole of Somerset.

Theatre Orchard and Culture Weston have taken over The Old Town Quarry until July 17th, with Live at The Quarry, a series of events ranging from theatre, cabaret and comedy to live music and DJs, all under canvas in beautiful natural surroundings.

On Saturday 3rd July we popped along to check out the ambience and cocktail list from Weston’s very own Proud Bar, as well as an exciting theatre project; Brothers Across the Decades from local performance artist Tom Marshman. Brothers Across the Decades revisits the Weston Super Mare of the 1990s, a time before Banksy’s 2015 exhibition Dismaland in the town’s disused Tropicana Water Park bought the modern art world queuing along the promenade and long before the regeneration of the UK’s crumbling Victorian seaside towns into arts and culture destinations, a la Margate et al.

Bristol born Tom has a special place in his heart for Weston Super Mare, studying drama at the town’s college in the 1990s, and his performance on Saturday brought this particular slice of place and time back to life so well, weaving spoken word and music to transport us back in time with him. Not just to the 90s though, but also to being sixteen again; a time of change, untapped potential and charging open-armed into young adulthood.

But like many coming of age stories, this one has a poignant side. As well as being treated to Tom’s joyful, side-splitting retelling of the colourful characters from his course and the town (the lecturer permanently in a full face of makeup and leotard, the gangs of beautiful Greek-Cypriot boys Tom schooled in how to capture the attention of girls, his love of Ebeneezer Goode), Tom takes us on another more serious journey; exploring the devastating impact of AIDS and how his elders shaped his experience as a young, queer man.

Tom successfully weaves humour, history and memoir throughout the performance, but the indelible imprint that I imagine many of us took home with us on Saturday was his sensitive retelling of Roger, a local café owner’s story. A story of how Roger’s life crumbled and slowly slipped away after a trip to New York and how he hid the real reason for his degenerating health from his family and local community. Also, the deep and electrifying moment him and Tom shared in a moment of wordless recognition of self in the other across his crowded café, and the impact Roger’s story, and the many stories like his, had on Tom growing up as a queer man.

It was over too soon; I could have spent so much more time in Tom’s particularly evocative slice of Weston Super Mare’s history, and his own. But it did give us time to enjoy the rainy, green fairy glen The Old Town Quarry is, some proper banging 90s tunes from DJ Discobobulator, and a couple more of the aforementioned cocktails as the sun went down. If tonight was anything to go by, if you head down to Weston Woods before 17th July, you could be in for a series of very nice surprises.

Check out the line up and get tickets for Live at The Quarry here, as well as Theatre Orchard’s other projects.