‘Help Yourself ’is a fun, high energy satire which cleverly explores societies “need to fix” anyone who expresses any discomfort. The performance encourages the audience to create a comforting place for others to express, free of expectation. Produced by Emma Ruse Productions this performance challenges the audience to explore how they contribute to this toxic attitude towards uncomfortable emotion.
Have you ever felt like you didn’t have the words? Have you ever felt like you wanted to say the exact right thing, but couldn’t? Have you ever wanted to make someone stop crying and just shut up? Then our Help Yourself seminar is for you! Help Yourself is a new piece of contemporary theatre exploring self-care, grief and friendship. Join Jess and Victoria – your expert hosts – as they share their patented 5-step Help Yourself approach, teaching you how to obliterate sadness in those around you.
Jess Brodie has a great strength in her physicality, from facial expressions to body language Brodie’s heightened movements accelerated the writing of the play. Brodie showed no inhibition, she has a playfulness in her expression which makes her a joy to watch on stage. Brodie’s comedic timing was fantastic, toying with the audience and creating anticipated funny moments.
Victoria Bianchi’s character has a broader emotional range, Bianchi has created a steady paced emotional journey for the character allowing the journey to be received as authentic by the audience. Bianchi brings an air of reality to the exaggerated satire, striking home the message of the performance. Vocally Bianchi has excellent projection and diction. Bianchi also had great facial expressions, her reactions were a show of their own creating some really interesting moments.
The two women have fantastic chemistry on stage, their relationship shines through in their performance. They have a yin and yang dynamic truly balancing each other out. The parts of the performance that focused more on ‘realism’ displayed the development of these characters and the relationship they had built between them. To differentiate and highlight this change, I feel the self help host characters could be heightened. The humour of the performance bodes well with the audience and with the little inhibition they display this could be stretched further.
One of the strengths of the performance as a whole is the fun interactive elements. The performance is lively by encouraging the audience to join in through suggestion slips and movement. As an audience member you truly have fun whilst you are participating although the show is successful in leaving you in thought in your participation of the society wide problem.
The use of repetition allows the audience to gain a comfortable familiarity throughout the piece. The repetition in this performance somewhat stifles the real emotional climax. Bianchi’s character reveals her tribulations and her dialogue is raw and wonderfully delivered. However, the audience at this time have been strung out on the cliff hanger slightly too long it feels.
Overall, ‘Help Yourself’ is a clever exploration of grief, loss and society’s attitude towards the grieving process. The performance is high energy, very engaging and has a lot of humorous moments throughout. The performance opens up an important conversation while shining a light on the extreme measures of toxic positivity and self help.
‘Help Yourself’ is playing the Demonstration Room – Summerhall from Aug 22nd-27th at 16:00. Grab your tickets here:
Theatre Scotland 
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