Review: Mmm Hmmm, Brewery Theatre

‘Buy one, get one free’; ‘Have you swiped your Nectar Card?’; ‘’You have entered an incorrect password’: all-pervasive and emotionless, phrases like these are the aural furniture of modern-day life.

But, in one of the wittiest sections of this acappella song theatre cycle written and directed by Bristol composer, performer and musical director Verity Standen, these modern mundanities are given high-pitched, sacred reverence by Verity and her two fellow performers, Bristol performers Ellie Showering and Dominie Hooper.

Clocking in at around 60 minutes, Mmm Hmmm is a series of sung sketches, with Standen, Hooper and Showering – all captivating performers, with voices that flip effortlessly from the comic to the transcendent – singing the emotions, sounds and textures of everyday life from the pleasure of tea and biscuits, via the keening anxieties of new love to the soothing undertow of First Great Western buffet-car announcements.

Aided by some beautiful choreography and Harriet de Winton’s malleable and nicely unshowy costumes (the sound is the thing here), the trio stretch your idea of what’s possible from the human voice. It’s an extremely intimate performance, too, and not just because The Brewery’s bijou size and steeply raked seating means that the performers are never more than metres away.

No, there’s something more open and revealing going on – with neither instruments nor the cool logic of spoken word to hide behind, the three performers’ personalities and what they decide to do with their faces, bodies and, of course, voices become all-consuming.

There’s plenty of comedy here – much of it through a mix of beauty and pathos, as when the trio sing, typically angelically, Judy Garland’s ‘You Made Me Love You’ while greedily, messily, shamefacedly ploughing through cookies. But there’s rawer, more emotional stuff too – such as the number that has Standen straining to escape her colleagues’ vice-like grip while her voice, correspondingly, ratchets upwards through effort, perspiration and desperation.

At other times (at almost all times, in fact) the pleasure is in experiencing the threesome’s tight synchronicity (divvying up phrases between them, taking a syllable each with hair’s-breadth precision) and joyous, unselfconscious physicality.

Mmm Hmmm has elements to enthral fans of theatre, music, comedy and the human voice. Standen, Showering and Hooper are all watchable performers in their own right, but when their wonderful voices are added into the mix, the result is a captivating series of aural sketches, ranging across the emotional spectrum and making you delight in the human voice and all it can convey.

Mmm Hmmm continues at the Brewery Theatre, Bristol until Saturday, 29 November. For more info and to book tickets, visit http://www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/detail/mmm_hmmm/