My First Bike

The show begins before the show.  It’s opening night.  As the audience waits on the deck outside the La Mama HQ theatre, Maude Davey and Jane Bayly come out in white blouses and long white skirts.  We don’t know why these outfits, and I don’t think we ever find out.  Maude has fourteen strips of white cardboard, each with the name of a song, or a poem, or a piece of prose, that will make up the show My First Bike.  It’s all very chatty and relaxed, like we all know – and like – each other, and we love Maude and Jane.

Maude hands round the fourteen cardboard strips to fourteen random people and asks the audience to decide in what order the items are to be performed.  The strips are arranged in the audience’s chosen order on a board.  Although the audience doesn’t know the content of any of these items, they get serious, and try to be helpful, rational and creative – even if an item called ‘The Beginning’ ends up at number seven, and a song, ‘Intro to the Orange Dragster (a flash kind of 1970s push bike)’, is second last. 

This running order is all new to Maude and Jane Bayly too, but that’s going to be the show.  Tonight.  The next night and the night after that will – presumably – be different - and surprising for dramaturg Anni Davey, Maude’s twin.  Anyway, the audience now goes into the theatre, collaborators, all included in Maude and Jane’s warmth, and the show begins. 

Maude performs and sometimes picks up a ukulele, and Jane provides some ironic commentary, and the music, and sometimes joins Maude in a song.  The show ‘freewheels through memories and unreliable dreamscapes’ – to quote the program.  It is in its way, the story of Maude’s life, but it is not sequential, or directly consequential in the sense of cause and effect (it can’t be’) but that doesn’t matter because the past is always present, and what happened then is what shapes and makes Maude – and us - now.  This audience-chosen running order shouldn’t work but it does – even if sometimes Maude has to stop and ask Jane, ‘What’re we doing now?’ 

The major memories and shaping forces in Maude’s life seem to happen in the 1970s when Maude is growing up and having adventures and gets her first bike, the orange roadster – the bike that gives her such an exhilarating sense of escape and freedom.  Some of these memories are very dark and Maude is scathing about that life and the careless, selfish morality alongside her Catholic upbringing – and she is in tears after the telling. 

There are monsters – the very first number is ‘If I Were Your Monster’ and that sets a tone for what follows – including the very scary, ‘Sharks & Wolves’.  There is a story about ‘Two Little Girls’ venturing into a pitch-dark cave that reminded me immediately of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.  A repeated refrain goes, ‘Are we lost?’ ‘No, I just don’t know where we are.’

There are hilariously awkward costume changes and some business with sand and also a rug which I must say I didn’t understand.  But we go along with it because it’s Maude – and Jane.  Afterwards, we might think that no one but Maude and Jane could’ve got away with this, but they do and the text and the music and their personas are what all together make My First Bike – this challenging, intriguing and utterly unique show in which ideas bounce off each other, ricochet and reverberate.  We have been stirred and moved and outraged, but we have also laughed a lot, and we end curiously buoyed up by the survival of the hugely talented, multivarious person on stage in the present.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill