Yellow Moon

Overview

A swaggering hero with something to prove and an aloof maiden for the winning are good, solid elements of a ballad, and as 'The Ballad of Leila and Lee', Yellow Moon has these down in it's 17-year-old 'Stag' Lee (John Shrimpton) and Silent Leila (Layla Estasy). There's adventure and romance and obstacles to overcome, there are repeated refrains, there's a fairly loose representation of time, and there's a focus on storytelling that sees the actions reimagined rather than taking place. The four actors shift between describing and performing the characters, both retrospectively, and they get to intervene, to depict a scene and then, effectively, take it back. "But of course that's not what happened,” the audience hears after some of the scenes where the characters seem to be making the most progress, until, finally, a “that's exactly how it was.”

It's self-conscious and melodramatic, but then, people are. Especially teenagers. The love story, filtered through Leila's self-harming fixation with tabloid glamour and Lee's awkward sexual bravado, holds together an episodic plot based around horribly bad choices and timing, through a world whose adult inhabitants (played by Danielle Cormack and Kenneth Moraleda in several roles each) aren't doing much to help them. The alternations between lyrical, choreographed passages of exposition and fairly straight-up depictions of key events and conversations can be a little jarring, and there wasn't much tension to the suspense, but the performances were credible and engaging and the play managed to tell a story and explore characters and experiment with form, which is really quite a lot to do.