★ ★ ★ ★
Well-known in her native Belfast and fresh from recording a BBC pilot, Alice McCullough makes her Edinburgh Fringe debut with an hour of lyrical performance poetry. Poems that are inventive, fresh and with so much heart, it left her audience spellbound.
We find Alice in her Cookie Monster pyjamas, on the phone to the Samaritans. Telling the stranger about her bipolar and her hospital stays. The response to her distress is ‘go for a walk’. McCullough’s set is eleven long-form poems that run together to form one long beguiling experience.
Alice speaks softly, inviting the audience into a relaxed and intimate space, and holding them there. Her first poems Angels and Countless things make for a great introduction to a wounded soul, Tell Me Ma had an anthemic quality. Her Bedtime Story evoked a fantasy world, and a love of C.S Lewis, The Lion’s Roar paid perfect tribute to Van Morrison.
It was Stormont that stood out as a personal favourite, as Alice’s powers as a poet showed full force, rendering the Northern Ireland Assembly as a living, beating heart, creating images of giant stethoscopes landing on its roof, how this heart was damaged by the infection of politicians; but simultaneously she showed her love and pride of Northern Ireland within the same lines. McCullough infuses all her poems with her love of Belfast, which is enchanting.
Love showed a fun and playful side to her performance poetry, the joy of sex writ large. Blank Canvases served as a memorandum on the fear of being creative and allowing self expression.
in her later poems Limelight and Melted Head we get a deep sense of McCullough’s focus, that of examining her culture, wanting to cut ties with much of the UK’s racist past, to celebrate inclusivity.
My Name is Alice is her final poem, which examines her own mental health, sung beautifully and serving as a fitting conclusion to a solid hour of performance poetry. Alice said after she welcomed feedback, and that her hour was very much a work in progress. It was an impressive feat to keep an audience rapt with poetry for that length of time, we can’t imagine how she can improve upon it, but we can’t wait to see what she does next.
