Review: Tink, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘A tour de force performance from solo actor Kat Kleve’

Tink (Kat Kleve) is a fairy in a world which bears an uncanny resemblance to our own, where girls are fairies and boys are elves but they still have KFC and Claire’s Accessories.

Five year old Tink is unstoppable in her self-belief that she will be her own person and not succumb to the narrative being imposed on her. A raucous bundle of can-do energy, she vows that she will be nothing like her namesake in Peter Pan, merely a voiceless sidekick to a male protagonist forced (by a male author) to compete for his attention against the other main female character.

But then she moves forward in time, into (pre-)teen girl culture, a world of sly betrayal and constant uncertainty, a world where the most important thing is to fit in, where there are firm rules about how girls should and should not behave and where descriptions like ‘confident’ are used as pejorative.

The sly verbal stiletto of “You’re so brave to wear that. I would never wear it, but it looks great on you” that instantly destroys Tink’s confidence in the Prom dress she was so proud of. The best friend who casually announces she’ll be hanging out with another girl in future. The party where over desperate attempts to fit in lead to social mortification. Everything works to force Tink into a socially acceptable mould.

The scenes are beautifully observed and will be painfully familiar within anyone who has been a teenage girl (or the parent of a teenage girl). The message is clear and powerful, yet easily overlooked in the hurly-burly of everyday life: by internalising the rules of the patriarchy, young women coercively police one another’s behaviour to enforce those rules on themselves and their peers.

And then Tink’s mother dies. Without maternal support and with only the flimsy torchlight of social (media) approval to guide her, Tink sinks lower into depression, ending up prone on the floor in a tiny dribble of light.

Kat Kleve in Tink at Tobacco Factory Theatres (2023) – photo: Camilla Adams

As a performance, Tink is a tour de force by solo actor Kat Kleve, who manages to embody not only Tink (from the accurately nerve-grating over-energetic five year old to the emotionally battered late teen) but also a variety of subsidiary characters. She plays guitar, she sings, and at no point does her engaging, engrossing performance slip.

Writer/director Lizzy Connolly has a remarkable knack for capturing scenes from everyday life with simplicity yet total accuracy. Whilst some scenes may feel almost cartoonish at first glance, they resonate with a sense of reality and the lived experience of many young women. The voices of Tink and the other characters ring true – never more so that in the scene where Tink talks (or does not talk) about her mother’s death. Yet amidst all the commonplace language, there is also plenty of humour and things to smile about.

The impact of the show might have been greater if it had ended at Tink’s moment of collapse, reduced to a crumpled heap in the dark, with her light extinguished and her wings crushed. A reminder that social forces can dim even the brightest spark to nothing.

Photo: Camilla Adams

It would have been bleak, but it would have left the audience with a clear call to arms: we must challenge the (self-)imposed diminution of women together. Girls need to stand up for girls’ right to be themselves. Just as it is the audience’s collective applause that saves Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, it is our collective action that is needed to save the Tinks of today.

Instead, Tink discovers a letter from her dead mother telling her that she can do it, that she can be her true self, that she’s special. It’s all a bit Katy Perry: Firework. It’s probably not Connolly’s intention – as she seeks to end the show on an empowering high – but paradoxically there is a sense of doom overhanging the ending. We have already seen Tink make this speech – at the start, when she was five, full of dreams and self-belief.

And so what happens after the house lights go up? Does Tink finally achieve her intent to live, laugh, love on her own terms, to dance like nobody’s watching – or will the forces of social conformity crush her light once more? Can – and should – a woman do it on her own? Or is this merely buying in to the socially atomising (and potentially victim-blaming) narrative that the power to improve our own lot lies only with the individual, and not with society as a whole?

There are weaknesses in Tink. The final message may be blurred, and the songs may be overlong at times. But ultimately Tink delivers a thought-provoking discourse about the destructiveness of others’ expectations and the erasure of originality. And a good few laughs along the way.

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Tink (age recommendation 13+) is at Tobacco Factory Theatres from March 1-4 at 8pm. Tickets are available at www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com.

Main photo: Tobacco Factory Theatres

Read more: Review: The Wall, Tobacco Factory Theatres – ‘Thought-provoking and thrillingly experimental’

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