Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Harriet Feeny, Francois Lecomte, Adam Gordon.

Murder always makes a good spectacle, it always seems to reach down into the very pit of human consciousness and allow even the strongest of moral citizens to subject themselves to nothing more than a titillated spectator, a background ghoul in which the perpetrator feels some weird affinity with. Murder is the biggest seller and when it committed by more than one person, when it is a conspiracy which involves defrauding someone of their life and their money, then the papers and the imagination, the talk and the gossip really salivate at the prospect.

Art can imitate murder and vice versa and as theatre company Tooth and Nail showed with incredible dexterity and dramatic style, art can even bring something as notorious as the true American story of the Lonely Hearts Killers to the stage with ease, poise and depth of character in the superb show, Hummingbird.

Named after the apparent sound that accompanied the electric chair in New York’s Sing Sing Prison, Hummingbird is a beautifully envisaged piece that grapples with the complexity of mutual destruction when two people end up being tied together in murder and the sensual nature of femininity, of the female gender being driven by envy, lust and rage to unnaturally take a life.

Harriet Feeny, Francois Lecomte and Adam Gordon all have taken their time studying at the Ecole Jaques Lecoq with great purpose and tremendous strides and it shows with exquisite body harmony and subtle, yet larger than life, moves just how adept any play can be when the motion and the urge calls for it.

Hummingbird not only tells the tale of murder, but of how a man can crush a woman’s spirit and drive her to do unimaginable things in the name of love, the weight she will bear when under pressure, something perfectly captured in the fluid transfer of muscles and sinew on stage by all three actors. It is with the greatest of respect to all who made this show at the Edinburgh Fringe possible, that the response by the audience inside Zoo, was one of great charm and sincere thanks.

Art can imitate murder but murder is never as beautiful as how it it is presented by Tooth and Nail. Fantastic!

Ian D. Hall