ON GOLDEN PONDLING
In her perfect little one-woman show Pondling, Genevieve Hulme-Beaman is captivating as Madeleine, a little girl who lives with her older brother on her grandfather’s farm. Too young to be a useful farmhand, Madeleine is largely left to her own devices, and spends her time crushing empty cans; riding to the pond on 
her My-Little-Pony bicycle; feeding barley porridge to her best friends, the chickens; and going on collecting expeditions to the thrift store. In fact, the only time her grandfather speaks is when he scolds her for picking a ragwort, eating a single one of which, he cautions her, can kill a cow. Madeleine promptly feeds the deadly yellow flower to a cow.
The act isn’t malicious. It’s the little girl’s way of asserting her power, her relevance, in a world that mostly ignores her. And what a rich, luscious world it is in her eyes, full of beautiful things—new patent-leather shoes, lace tablecloths, exotic lipstick, glamorous mothers, and a raven-haired 14-year-old “man†whom Madeleine spies every Friday at the local candy store buying cigarettes. Hopelessly in love with the teen, Madeleine’s is a turbulent universe of emotions, of desperate hopes and fiery longings, of agonizing heartbreak and bitter disappointment.
The language of Ms. Hulme-Beaman’s tight, often hilarious script boasts an elegant simplicity, making our grasp of her images immediate and immediately personal. Directed with gentle economy by Paul Meade, Ms. Hulme-Beaman’s performance, with its abundant facial contortions and extreme volume modulations, captures Madeleine’s clumsiness as she tries to be elegant, her foolishness as she tries to be clever, her timidity as she tries to be outgoing. Without a hint of sentimentality Ms. Hulme-Beaman makes real for us the multitude of thoughts and feelings experienced moment to moment by a child who hasn’t yet learned the distinction between what she’d like to be real and what is.
photos by Paul McCarthy
Pondling
Gúna Nua Theatre Company & Ramblinman
part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival
59E59 Theaters
ends on October 4, 2015
for tickets, visit Ticket Central
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I was lucky enough to see this performance at the South Bank in London. It was totally mesmerising. I would so love to catch it again.