REVIEW: The Nettle Horse by Little John Nee
REVIEW: The Nettle Horse by Little John Nee
A magical trip to take you far away from the real world.
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The first day that a tent goes up in a field it sticks out. Something is there that wasn’t there before and you notice it, your attention is drawn to it and then you forget what the field looked like before. When the tent is packed up and removed you go through the same process in reverse except you now have a way of looking at the same field in a different way: what it looks like with and without the canvas.
The Nettle Horse, performed by Little John Nee at the West Cork Fit Up Theatre Festival, was both performed in a tent on the green and has the same effect of offering us a different way of seeing things. It is an enchanting piece that combines storytelling, music played by the performer on 20 instruments with loop pedals and a point of view that is enticing, engaging and entertaining.
In the best story telling traditions Nee does not offer us a linear tale from A to B but takes us on diversions into fantasy, politics and sometimes just plain silliness. Readers of a certain vintage may remember the comedy show The Two Ronnies. Towards the end of each show, in what might be called the 11 o’clock slot, Ronnie Corbett would sit on a giant high backed chair usually dressed in a golfing jumper, and lean forward to tell us a story. It would invariably involve a misunderstanding or a mishap that had been overseen or manufactured by Mrs Corbett or the nameless person referred to as “My Produuuuucer”. The story would deviate for a few minutes before Corbett tied up all the ends in the final 30 seconds. The Nettle Horse provides us with a similar structure.
We are taken into a world just far enough removed from ours that it is able to offer perspective on how we live but close enough to our own experiences to be recognisable. Our narrator is selling beetles as snacks (“because everything started with The Beatles”) and we soon learn that Ireland has changed. Electric cars are the norm and traffic roar has been replaced by the ‘humming of a thousand cars’.
Along the way a boy stings his backside while trying to have a poo in some nettles and meets a horse whom he befriends. Nee introduces us to a magical phrase that will lift anyone’s depression just by repeating it; “State of the art Scandinvian horse plough” - apparently the chanting of this phrase has a wondrous effect on our mental health. The clever part is that it is exactly the kind of phrase we might expect to hear nowadays used by hipster lifestyle influencers of the type that want to convince us that ‘having’ (or more correctly buying) something will add meaning to our lives.
In the world of The Nettle Horse there is also a widowed Boston billionaire who buys thousands of acres and builds pyramid, there is a scene in a shopping centre car park and above all there is imagination that creates magic. There are beautiful pieces of music that are crafted and arranged before our very eyes and then adapted and remoulded as scenes and emotions change. The technical skill involved is a musical version of the big top’s trapeze artists performing without a safety net.
Little John Nee’s talent is that he can perform illusions without needing physical props. We all see what our own imagination wants us to see in this incredible piece of theatre. In the musical Evita there is a line in the song I’d Be Surprisingly Good For You that Colonel Peron says to the young Eva Duarte upon meeting her for the first time: “… when you act, you take us away from the squalor of the real world” and Little John Nee’s Nettle Horse takes us away from a tent on a green by an estuary in beautiful Ballydehob on a wonderful summer’s evening and transports us to the limits of our own imaginations. This is the magic of live theatre and I guarantee that if you watch this show you will also be transported.
Little John Nee is a writer, performer, storyteller and musician with a valuable and unique view on the world. His work has toured internationally and you can discover more about him HERE
The Fit Up Festival West Cork is an annual theatre festival that brings a programme of incredible theatre to rural villages and islands around West Cork. Plays are performed in village halls, community centres and open air spaces as well as in the Festival Tent at Ballydehob. For more information click HERE
COMING SOON MY FIRST COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES
Thank you for spending your time here at The JasonWard Creative Substack. Please consider supporting my work by taking out a subscription. A paid subscription gives you access to exclusive content plus the entire archive of over 100 articles, short stories, reviews, interviews, podcasts and playlists.